The City Council of La Laguna has put out to tender this Tuesday the consolidation works of the ruins of San Agustin, within the overall project of rehabilitation of the old church, destroyed in a fire in 1964. The intervention, which has a bidding budget of 933,706 euros and an execution period of twelve months, aims to recover this space as a place accessible to citizens in conditions that allow their use and enjoyment, without losing the characteristics of the building ruins.

For the mayor of La Laguna, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, “this is a long-awaited intervention, which allows us to finally advance in the process of recovering for the city one of our heritage jewels, which has enormous possibilities of use as a building for cultural activities. The Mayor underlined “the happy coincidence that this news comes precisely on the days when we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the declaration of La Laguna as a World Heritage City”.

The consolidation of the building is the first step for the construction of the future San Agustin Cultural Center, according to the project with which the study SIC Architecture and Urbanism won the international competition convened by the City of La Laguna in 2005. The scope of the work defined in this phase of the project is the consolidation of the structure, without affecting the adjacent building of the Bethlemites.

Basically it is planned to consolidate the ruin from the choir area of what was the church to the Guillermo Rancés square. The old temple will become a recreational area in the form of an open-air square, where the ruins of the church can be seen and activities such as meetings and gatherings can take place. The building will not be completely rehabilitated until the Bethlehem building is adapted, which will be the subject of a later phase.

The project for the recovery of the old church of San Agustín dates back to September 2005, when the FAM Architecture and Urban Planning studio (currently SIC Arquitectura y Urbanismo) won the international competition called for this purpose “for the integral quality and economic viability and profitability of the proposals, their insertion in the surroundings, the responses to the conditioning factors of the place, respect for the historical conditions of the site, the contribution and innovation of the solutions proposed, as well as the strict observance of the applicable protection regulations, in addition to compliance with the object of the competition”, according to the jury’s decision.

The process of contracting the basic project and execution for the construction of the San Agustín Cultural Centre will not be completed until April 2008. In December 2008, the drafting of the basic project was completed and at the end of 2009 the execution projects in the demolition and consolidation phase and the rehabilitation phase were delivered. After a long break of almost seven years, in July 2016 the City Council awarded SIC Arquitectura y Urbanismo SLP the modification of the consolidation project, to adapt it to the current regulations that allow people to access the interior and, in a later phase, to proceed with the demolition of areas of the Bethlehem building, which is in danger of collapse. This project was handed over to the City Council in October of the same year.