Las Palmas (Part 3) The Old part of the City

Parque San Telmo   

After a couple of days, we took Alex and Lucy’s advice and decided to explore the Triana and Vegueta areas of Las Palmas city. These are the most historic and architecturally rich city districts with traditional colonial buildings. Entering Parque San Telmo at the northern end of Triana the architecture and atmosphere changes markedly as you leave the concrete high rises behind you and enter this old part of the city. In the corner of the park an unusual small domed building now acts as a classy café serving the outdoor tables and at the other side of the park is the San Telmo church, one of the first churches built in the city.

Triana is largely pedestrianised and the old-style buildings have now mostly been taken over by shopping boutiques, cafés and restaurants. It’s really a rather nice area to wander around.

Walking into the Vegueta   

Half a kilometre further south is the even older Vegueta district. Here, as we explored the pretty narrow alleyways, we saw distinctive decorated doorways with wooden balconies above.

Plaza del Pilar Nuevo   

Plaza del Pilar Nuevo has particularly richly decorated examples of both. These small plazas are dotted around the focal point of Vegueta, the Catedral de Santa Ana. Built in grey volcanic stone it dates from the early 15^th century and took over 350 years to complete. The bell towers stand well above the surrounding 2 storey buildings which helped in navigating our way around to the front of the cathedral.

Catedral de Santa Ana   

The frontal view definitely shows off the cathedral to its best but it was actually quite hard to get a perspective because the Plaza de Santa Ana in front of the church was closed off whilst a temporary stage was being built.

Plaza del Espíritu Santo   

Continuing on through the narrow, cobbled streets we came cross the rather attractive Plaza del Espíritu Santo [Ed: disappointingly, it has no benches so we couldn’t stop to eat our picnic lunch there]….

Balcones road and Plaza San Agustín (bottom R)

… before then zig-zagging our way through the other passages to pass the cathedral again and into Balcones road to see more of the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ style balconies. Plaza San Agustín sits at the eastern, coastal, side of Vegueta and from here we turned to retrace our steps to the northwest.

Casa-Museo de Colón   

That took us past the lovely Casa-Museo de Colón, once the opulent residence of Las Palmas’ early governors and also, apparently a house where Christopher Columbus once lived.

With some touristy stuff done we returned to BV via an ice cream shop and then the Fischer Panda agent. We had quite a lot of BV admin still to do and so didn’t need to rush away from Las Palmas immediately but our biggest concern was that we hadn’t heard anything from the generator engineer. With no idea of when or how much notice he would give us of his visit to service the generator, we were feeling very limited in how far afield we could explore. The ‘front of house’ were surprised that we still hadn’t heard from the engineer but acknowledged that we wanted the work done as soon as possible so that we could move on.

Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands