The Standing Committee on Land Management and Historical Heritage of the City of La Laguna has agreed to propose to the full corporation the initiation of a dossier of minor amendment of the Special Protection Plan in order to include several buildings in the municipality in the catalog of protected buildings, thus ensuring their conservation, against the threat of possible demolition.

The most outstanding of these properties is an old two-storey house located on Lucas Vega Avenue, in the area of San Benito (where the López Workshops used to be located), for which it has been agreed to begin the cataloguing of its façade and other architecturally important elements, such as the volume and roof. The house, which dates from the eighteenth century, follows the model of traditional vernacular architecture in the Mudéjar tradition, with a side corridor and a hipped roof covered with Arabic tiles.

La Laguna’s Councillor for Territorial Planning, Santiago Pérez, maintains that the “property has indisputable heritage values and, in addition, for many years it has formed a characteristic image of the surroundings of San Benito together with the chapel, which are very important in the city and in the idiosyncrasy of the lagoon”, and explains that this protection measure “is part of the management of historical heritage from a town planning point of view, which we will continue to develop, always trying to find a balance between the heritage values that must be preserved and the consequences of cataloguing them”.

“The sensitivity of the current government group in this matter is maximum,” assures Santiago Pérez, “being aware that the protection of the historical complex in the long term must contain a high degree of sustainability from the economic point of view.

The councillor recalls “that in the event that a property is classified as protected, its owner loses the possibility of demolishing it and rebuilding it if it is in a state of deterioration or ruin. And if the owner does not have the will or the economic capacity to recover it, it will finally be the administration that will be forced to rehabilitate it and maintain it with public money that might not be recovered later. So we are talking about a relationship between objectives to be achieved and economic availability to do so.