He Tenerife Council will allocate in the medium term a total of 26 million euros for the rehabilitation and expansion of the eannex building to the Insular Palace. The first step is the approval by the Governing Council of the tender for the work directions for the restoration of the façade and interior of the property for an amount of 1.4 million euros. It will be structured in five annual installments (2024-2028) and will be followed by the contract for the reconstruction works, the first phase, for 14 million euros. This action must Add the garage and parking project (the second temporary moment) on the site, a new project until now, work that will involve an outlay of another 12 million. The president of the Cabildo, Rosa Davila, recalled that it is a space that has “a surface area of 5,649 square meters, unusable for more than ten years (end of 2013) and whose works were paralyzed in 2019 due to structural problems that forced the interior to be emptied and that we hope rebuild”. Dávila stressed that “the intention is for it to once again be a reference for the city of Santa Cruz and the entire Island.”
In September 2018, when Carlos Alonso (CC) was president of the Tenerife Council, the institution put out a tender for the rehabilitation works of the building annexed to the Insular Palace, closed five years earlier due to structural problems. It did so for 8.9 million and with an execution period of 33 months. Neither financial amount nor periodicity were met. Not at all. In fact, in June 2019 it was announced that the interior of the property would be emptied and that the work would continue for three years from that moment. The Covid-19 pandemic ended the forecasts. From successive postponements and modifications of what was planned to the termination of the contract begins. Now this long process is resumed.
Also the main building
The one in the annex is not the only avatar of the emblematic buildings of the Cabildo de Tenerife. The Insular Palace itself, headquarters and main symbol of the institutional representation of Tenerife residents, does not escape this stigma either. In fact, the external protective network that has accompanied the hundreds of people who pass through there every day for safety reasons since 2008 is partly maintained there. In March 2023, the island government of the socialist Pedro Martin He made another announcement at the moment without result: the restoration of the façade after more than a decade of paralysis. He did so as a consequence of the final ruling of the Superior Court of Justice of Canary Islands (TSJC), announced in January, which obliged the company awarded the restoration contract to reimburse 4.5 million euros to the Corporation for “its poor execution” and the defects detected.
Martín then highlighted the work carried out to unblock a conflict that affects the restoration of an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) by architect José Enrique Marrero Regalado (1935-1940). In said ruling, the TSJC considered that the defects had occurred as a consequence of the poor execution of the contract for the Monumental Restoration works of the facades of the Main and Annex Buildings of the Cabildo de Tenerife, awarded in 2004. After the delivery of the works in 2008 and the evidence of construction defects, the Cabildo proceeded to install protective fences for safety and, a few years later, in 2014, it was the successful bidder itself who installed a protective mesh. For now, the exterior image of the Cabildo, that of its facades, remains more or less the same as it was ten years ago. Yesterday a step was taken to try to improve it.
