Revitalization Plans for Guanarteme Cinema and Fyffes Building in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

The Gran Canarian palms

Many, many years ago, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria there were cinemas in almost every neighborhood. Now that, to watch movies on the big screen, you have to go to shopping centers, the names of theaters like Sol, Bahía, Rex, Rialto, Avenida, Torrecine, Vegueta, Cuyás or Avellaneda sound almost prehistoric, although the latter two survived in Triana and Vegueta transformed into theaters. The paper newspapers of the time were filled with advertisements with the week’s releases, and it was one of the most populated sections in Diario de Las Palmas or the Eco de Canarias.

One of those cinemas was the Guanarteme, which in addition to its traditional sessions, was the place where thousands of children learned for the first time what a movie theater was, where you could see on a giant screen the adventures of Tarzan jumping from vine to vine or getting tangled with a crocodile, Francis the mule talking or Harpo Marx playing the harp. Massive morning sessions of children who did not appear above the seats, which became an excursion through the neighborhood that marked the limit with the beyond, the end of the city, between mechanics workshops, the smell of carpentry sawdust and the CICER smoke.

The Guanarteme cinema resisted the picket, unlike others spread around the city. It no longer stands out for its height compared to the buildings that have grown in the surroundings. Over the years it became, in the nineties, the Evangelical Center, a sign that remains on the façade, even from there a local television of the same religious denomination broadcast. Closed for years, it became municipal property with no defined use until now.

Master plans for the Fyffes building and the Guanarteme Cinema

The City Council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has put out to tender the master plans for the transformation of the Fyffes buildings and the Guanarteme Cinema, with an investment of almost 104 thousand euros, and to define the use and nature that the two spaces will have as cultural centers of proximity and creation spaces, in addition to protecting its heritage and historical value.

In the specific case of the old cinema, it is intended to become a center of socially useful innovations, with special interest in cinema and audiovisual heritage, in addition to becoming a meeting space for the neighborhood of the Guanarteme neighborhood, so in need of municipal infrastructure. and with significant population growth this century.

Pieces for the European Capital of Culture 2031

As for the Fyffes building, on the isthmus of Santa Catalina, they want to turn it into an asset for the candidacy of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to be the European Capital of Culture in 2031, with the name Fyffes Cultural Factory and for it to be an icon of conservation and rehabilitation of historical industrial heritage.

The specifications for the tender have already been published on the State Contracting Platform and proposals can be submitted until next February 5 at 11:59 p.m.

2024-01-17 21:40:12
#Guanarteme #Cinema