Neighborhood of Nuestra Señora del Carmen
The neighborhood of Nuestra Señora del Carmen is one of those places that allow us to understand how the capital majorera grew and was organized throughout the twentieth century. It is the first social housing development of the old Puerto Cabras, the name given to the city until 1956, and is today a small urban testimony of the daily history of the municipality.
Its origin dates back to 1944, when the City Council of Puerto Cabras acquired the land from Mrs. Josefa Castañeyra Carballo to be used for an ambitious housing project. These plots were ceded to the Economic Command of the Canary Islands, the institution in charge of executing the construction of this group of houses, within a state policy aimed at guaranteeing housing for families with fewer resources in a post-war context.
The result was a group of 12 houses known as “cheap houses”, built with a simple, functional and recognizable architecture, very similar to that of other developments promoted in the Canary Islands during those years. This typology even generated its own style, identified by many as part of the so-called “Mando Económico architecture”.
The houses, none of them larger than 80 square meters, were designed for family life and had a living room, bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, bathroom and hallway. Their total construction cost amounted to 335,806 pesetas, a modest figure even for the time, which made it possible to offer them for rent for 23 pesetas a month, a symbolic amount that was intended to facilitate access to housing.
The contracts were signed on March 20, 1944, although the first residents began to occupy them between 1945 and 1947. The allocation was not random: priority was given to ex-combatants of the Civil War, persons mutilated in the conflict or direct relatives of deceased soldiers. Specifically, four homes were assigned to ex-combatants, two to war wounded, three to widows or parents of deceased soldiers, and the remaining three were left for the free shift.
Today, to walk through the neighborhood of Nuestra Señora del Carmen is to tour a quiet space fully integrated into the city, where daily life coexists with historical memory. A little known corner for the visitor, but ideal to discover how Puerto del Rosario began to be built as a modern city, neighborhood by neighborhood, from the most essential: the home.
