Tolin's 2024 World Cruise blog posts, Day 106, Apr 24, 2024, Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canary Islands), Spain
Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain commonly abbreviated as Santa Cruz, is a city, the capital of the island of Tenerife, Province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and one of the capitals of the Canary Islands, along with Las Palmas. Santa Cruz has a population of 206,593 (2013) within its administrative limits. The urban zone of Santa Cruz extends beyond the city limits with a population of 507,306 and 538,000 within urban area. It is the second largest city in the Canary Islands and the main city on the island of Tenerife, with nearly half of the island's population living in or around it.
Santa Cruz is located in the northeast quadrant of Tenerife,
130 miles off the north-western coast of Africa within the Atlantic Ocean.
The distance to the nearest point of mainland Spain is 810 miles. Between
the 1833 territorial division
of Spain and 1927, Santa Cruz de Tenerife was the sole capital of
the Canary Islands, until 1927 when the archipelago was split into the current
two provinces. The port is of great importance and is the communications
hub between Europe, Africa and Americas, with cruise ships arriving from many
nations. The city is the focus for domestic and inter-island communications in
the Canary Islands.
The city is home to the Parliament of the Canary Islands, the
Audience of Accounts of the Canary Islands, the Captaincy General of the Canary
Islands, the Canarias Ministry of the Presidency (shared on a four-year
cycle with Las
Palmas), one half of the Ministries and Boards of the Canarias
Government, (the other half being located in Gran
Canaria), the Tenerife Provincial Courts and two courts of the Superior
Court of Justice of the Canary Islands. There are several faculties of
the La Laguna University in Santa Cruz,
including the Fine Arts School and the Naval Sciences Faculty. Its harbor is
one of Spain's busiest. It is important for commercial and passenger traffic as
well as for being a major stopover for cruisers en route from Europe to the Caribbean.
The city also has one of the world's largest carnivals.
The Carnival of Santa Cruz de
Tenerife now aspires to become a World Heritage Site, and is the second
largest in the world.
The varied architecture of the city stands out, highlighting
the Auditorio de Tenerife, which is considered one
of the greatest exponents of contemporary architecture. In the
panoramic view of the city, the Torres de Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz
Towers) also stand out, with the tallest twin towers in Spain at
390 feet high. Other outstanding places are the Plaza de España (Spain
Square), which is the nerve center of the city, and the Parque García Sanabria, a large urban park
located in the center of the city. Outside the city but in its municipal
district, Playa de Las Teresitas and a large part of
the Macizo de
Anaga stand out, declared a Biosphere
Reserve by UNESCO in 2015. Santa Cruz de Tenerife hosts the first
headquarters of the Center UNESCO in
the Canary Islands. In recent years the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has seen
the construction of a significant number of modern structures and the
city's skyline is
the sixth in height across the country, behind Madrid, Benidorm, Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao.
In 2012, the British newspaper The
Guardian included Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the list of the five
best places in the world to live, next to the Cihangir district,
in Istanbul; the
district of Sankt
Pauli, in Hamburg, the
north coast of Maui,
in Hawaii and Portland,
in Oregon. The
82% of the municipal territory of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is considered a
natural area, this is due in large part to the presence of the Anaga
Rural Park. This fact makes Santa Cruz the third largest municipality in
Spain with the highest percentage of natural territory, after Cuenca (87%) and Cáceres (83%).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_de_Tenerife
We began our excursion this day with a short stop at the quaint seaside town of Candelaria.
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