By Isidro Felipe Acosta. Since its declaration as a protected space in 1987, there have been many projects to achieve the recovery of the Castro Boulevardon the coast of The Realejos which has been the object of desire for tourism promoters for decades, and has survived droughts, acts of vandalism, devastating urban projects and the negligence of administrations.
The announcement of the interest of the Cabildo and the City Council of Los Realejos to rescue the project for the restoration of the house with the intention of creating the visitor center of the area, after more than ten years sleeping the dream of the just, is great news , and we hope that the last of the chapters of a long soap opera that once and for all values this jewel of the islands’ nature.
I dedicated more than 10 years of my life to the dissemination of this protected space, since back in 1985 two of the five cannons that made up the embrasure of the San Fernando fort disappeared, a small defensive fortress that protected the coast from pirates and corsairs.
In those years, a group of experts were working on the preparation of a draft of what would be the Catalog of Protected Natural Areas, and Rambla de Castro did not enter into those first plans. She had to find time to investigate all the possible files so that the canaries would have knowledge of what we had and could lose. Thus, almost a hundred newspaper articles arose, the necessary ones for Rambla de Castro to be known, loved and protected.
an endless story
Among the many beneficiaries of the first land distributions after the conquest of Tenerife was the Portuguese Hernando de Castro, who in 1501 received eleven fanegas of dry land in the place of La Rambla, where he founded his hacienda, and in which it is said the first vineyards of Tenerife were planted. Throughout the centuries, European travelers have passed through here and have recorded its beauty. It reminded Sabino Berthelot of the gardens of Armida, without the need for the hand of man, and for the Belgian Jules Leclercq, its flora was comparable to what he saw in Rio de Janeiro and its abundant caves made him dream of the island of Calypso. Artists of the stature of JJ Williams and Marianne North captured her charms in their notebooks and canvases, and photographers such as Marcos Baeza and Jordao da Luz Perestrello, from Madeiran, portrayed her and published her first postcards when the 20th century saw its first light.
Rambla de Castro experienced its most glorious period when the Betancourt y Molina family became Mayorazgo between the 18th and 19th centuries, and its worst nightmare at the beginning of the 1970s with the implementation of an excessive urban project that gave rise to almost irreparable bite to the natural space. Even Loro Parque, at the time that its enclosure was threatened by the expansion of the Punta Brava highway, announced the transfer of its facilities to Rambla de Castro.
A devastating project
On November 15, 1972, two real estate companies appeared before the City Council of Los Realejos stating that they had acquired the farm located in this municipal term called Rambla de Castro, and all its uses, among which was the Partial Plan project of the same name. .
The land of 104,201 meters was divided into three large sectors: A green area with a hotel hanging on the cliffs with an area of 47,000 square meters, with two tennis courts and swimming pools and which also includes the house and a valley populated by abundant palm trees and a network of trails.
The second of the plots would be dedicated to apartments and would occupy an area of 25,000 square meters located to the northeast of the plot, near the sea. As the land is sloping, the staggered construction would remain as an authentic viewpoint to the sea, while a third would be dedicated to bungalows and would be located on the terraces dedicated to the cultivation of bananas.
This and other tourist projects were paralyzed mainly due to the world oil crisis of 1973. A brief war, that of Yom Kippur, lasting just three weeks that unleashed one of the biggest economic and energy crises of the 20th century.
In the mid 1980s, the owners of the land resumed the urbanization project. Initially, there was talk of a 600-bed hotel and later, given the social alarm that this action aroused, the construction of open-plan apartment blocks in two areas of the cliff.
At the end of 1992, it was agreed to sign an urban agreement between the town hall and the owners, by which a large part of the property was ceded to the municipality, some 80,000 square meters including the house, the fort and the springs of water, in exchange for the then Subsidiary Planning Regulations, the precise urban conditions for the construction of a hotel were collected.
A large number of film sequences have been shot in this space, among which the first version of Moby Dick, Agent 007, and the mid-twenties of the last century, stand out. The thief with the white glovesby José González Rivero and Romualdo García de Paredes, considered the first canarian feature film
