Plaza de Cairasco

Plaza de Cairasco presents the Gabinete Literario with paired towers, domes, and a façade facing the square. Large windows pattern the façade with light and shadow. Fernando Navarro and Rafael Massanet reshaped the building in 1919, giving stone, iron, and stucco the visual language of Canary modernismo. The building became a historic-artistic monument in 1985. Inside, central staircases, painted salons, and decorative details preserve an earlier taste and have attracted film and television productions. A circular garden holds Cairasco’s bust before the façade. Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa was a poet, dramatist, and musician who organised literary gatherings and wrote from an island perspective. Paolo Triscornia di Ferdinando sculpted the bust in 1894. The Gabinete society, founded in 1844 with Robert Houghton as first president, continues to animate local cultural life. López Echegarreta also planned an earlier nineteenth-century theatre here. Later, local demand for new stages produced a seaside coliseum known as Pérez Galdós. Plaza de Cairasco joins architecture, memory, and cultural society.