PLAZA DE SANTO DOMINGO (LA LAGUNA)

The Plaza de Santo Domingo has passed through various states since the time of the conquest, reaching us as the space or lot that houses the headquarters of the City Post Office. This building shares the space with two gardens, a front one in the form of a square and a rear one, residual, with not very well defined characteristics.

According to the study carried out by Francesco Salomone and Antonio Garcia Gallo, the historical planimetry of the city of La Laguna (Tous, op. Cit.), Reproduces this space next to the Church and Convent of Santo Domingo. Chronologically, after the Torriani plan, those of M. le Chevalier from 1779, Antonio Pereira Pacheco and Ruiz from 1809 and 1831, as well as two anonymous plans from 1814 and another dated between 1831 and 1941, represent it completely empty. As of 1860, the plans already include the planting of trees in this square by means of alignments of points, such as those of the Topographic Brigade of the Corps of Engineers in 1874 and 1899. It is between 1956 and 1958, when the current building of Correos y Telégrafos, occupying a large part of this square and for which the walled enclosure that existed and most of the grove were destroyed, except for some specimens of plane trees and the Canarian palm tree, which were left on the rear facade of this building, as an example. A photograph of Agustín Arévalo from 1959. As a culmination of this work, the City Council of La Laguna carried out the urbanization project of this plot, proceeding to pave the street of Santo Domingo and the layout of the side and rear streets of the building of mails. In the following decade of the sixties, the small square was paved at the lower level in front of the church and convent, parking spaces were enabled in the upper square and a simple landscaping was carried out on the sides of the square and in two planters before the main facade of the Post Office building. In 1968 this square was adorned with a luminous sculpture by the artist José Abad and in 1974 a bust dedicated to the writer Luis Álvarez Cruz was installed, the work of the sculptor Enrique Cejas Zaldívar.