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Gentrification, Displacement, and

Tourism in Santa Cruz De Tenerife
a b
Luz Marina García Herrera , Neil Smith & Miguel Ángel Mejías
a
Vera
a
University of La Laguna, Spain
b
City University of New York
Published online: 16 May 2013.

To cite this article: Luz Marina García Herrera , Neil Smith & Miguel Ángel Mejías Vera (2007)
Gentrification, Displacement, and Tourism in Santa Cruz De Tenerife, Urban Geography, 28:3,
276-298, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.28.3.276

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 GENTRIFICATION, DISPLACEMENT, AND TOURISM
IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE1

Luz Marina García Herrera2

Department of Geography
University of La Laguna, Spain

Neil Smith
Center for Place, Culture and Politics
Graduate Center, City University of New York
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Miguel Ángel Mejías Vera

Department of Geography
University of La Laguna, Spain

Abstract: This paper analyzes the relationship between postwar urban redevelopment and the
more recent transition that fused subsequent gentrification with tourism strategies in Santa Cruz
de Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). First, it examines the long endeavor of local government to
foster neighborhood change in coalition with tourism and commercial development planning,
and documents the intimate connection between gentrification and displacement. Second, it
sheds light on the entwined effects of gentrification and tourism in the transformation of this
urban outpost of the European Union. [Key words: gentrification, displacement, Tenerife.]

Since the 1980s, as researchers began to comprehend the role of tourism as a central
element in global, national, and urban economies, it has become a serious and significant
focus for scholarship in economic, urban, and cultural geography. The connection
between tourism and urban economies has come under special scrutiny, a relationship
that is only expected to intensify as urban tourism undergoes rapid growth and plays a
more prominent role in the evolution of urban form (Marchena Gómez, 1998; Fainstein
and Gladstone, 1999; Troitiño Vinuesa, 2000). This makes it surprising, as Mullins
(1991) has pointed out, that very little is yet known about the connection between urban
tourism and the much-researched process of gentrification, arguably one of the most
visible manifestations of tourism in many urban landscapes (Zukin, 1998). Whether
or not we accept that gentrification represents an expression of the “postmodern city”

1
The authors would like to thank three anonymous referees for their valuable and detailed comments on an
earlier draft. Part of this research was funded by SEC 1999-0253 grant from Spanish Science and Technology
Ministry. Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the RC21 Conference on Social Inequality,
Redistributive Justice, and the City, Amsterdam 2001 and Fourth International Conference of the Critical
Geography Group, Mexico DF, 2005.
2
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Luz Marina García Herrera, Departamento de
Geografía, Universidad de La Laguna, Campus de Guajara, 38071 La Laguna, Tenerife, Canarias, Spain; tele-
phone: 34-922-317760; fax: 34-922-317723; e-mail: lmgarcia@ull.es

276
Urban Geography, 2007, 28, 3, pp. 276–298.
Copyright © 2007 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 277

(Mullins, 1991), it is evident that this process does express the leading edge of urban
spatial change in many metropolitan areas in Europe and North America, and its signifi-
cance is expanding.
By the 1990s, it was already clear that contemporary gentrification no longer repre-
sented simply “a narrow and quixotic oddity in the housing market,” as in its earliest
phases, but had become “the leading residential edge of a much larger endeavor: the class
remake of the central urban landscape” (Smith, 1996, p. 39). As gentrification became a
more trenchant process in the central city, it became increasingly integrated with other
processes of economic development, including tourism. The appeal of tourism is the
desire to witness and experience places different from one’s home, and indeed several
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early gentrifying neighborhoods, from Philadelphia’s Society Hill to London’s Islington,

became, without intending it, magnets for tourism. As this paper suggests, that accidental
connection has become increasingly intentional, a strategic goal of urban policy and plan-
ning. The paradox, of course, is that to the extent that cities devote themselves to tourist-
oriented development in the effort to capture revenues, and build the amenities that they
think will attract tourists, they run the risk of diluting the geographical distinctiveness that
makes them attractive in the first place (Harvey, 1989; Urry, 1990; Judd and Fainstein,
1999; Campesino Fernández, 2000). Like tourism, gentrification also promises and
encourages a considerable expansion of consumption possibilities in the city, and in
recent years the target audience for gentrification increasingly overlaps with the middle
class that fuels tourism. Insofar as gentrified neighborhoods become tourist destinations
themselves, by dint of their new or recaptured distinctiveness, the separate logics and
motives of tourism and gentrification begin to blur: the one begins to feed the other, and
the dilution of geographical distinctiveness is further exacerbated.
Yet this tendency toward a loss of geographical difference is only one side of the story;
both tourism and gentrification also reproduce new forms of social and economic differ-
ence in the urban landscape. Especially as gentrification becomes generalized, compared
with its more local, fragmented, and marginal roots more than four decades ago, the vari-
ety of forms taken by the process also expands. The expansion of tourism in the urban
economy has a similarly differentiated and uneven effect. Different cities adopt different
strategies in the attempt to capture tourist expenditures, and these strategies have differ-
ent implications for the ways in which gentrification and tourism are entwined. Cutting
across these experiences, however, is the transformation of land and property markets and
the widespread displacement, whether voluntary or coerced, of former residents. State
policy and capital investment invariably play a key role in this transformation, heavily
underwriting the tourist city and the gentrified city alike (Hackworth, 2000, 2002;
Hackworth and Smith, 2001). The investment of significant portions of state capital in the
central and inner cities not only subsidizes private market reinvestment directly but also
demolishes old landscapes and provides modernized infrastructure for subsequent devel-
opment. Whatever its private market façade, gentrification capitalizes on a history of state
regulation and intervention in land and property markets. The displacement of previous
residents to make way for gentrification and tourist developments also contributes to
the redifferentiation of the city insofar as displaced residents become homeless or are
moved elsewhere, transforming the social geography of areas not directly affected by
redevelopment.
 278 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

In addition to recording the history of gentrification in the refurbished port city of

Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, this paper contributes to the broader gentri-
fication literature by exploring a very early and ongoing instance of the nexus of gentrifi-
cation, tourism, and displacement. It analyzes a valuable archival source of
redevelopment and displacement data to document the prelude to gentrification and its
early emergence, and it explores the subsequent links forged by capital and the state
between gentrification and tourism.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
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An increasingly central element in broader processes of urban change, gentrification

has become increasingly systematic, planned, and generalized, and it has simultaneously
become a global phenomenon (Wyly and Hammond, 1999; Smith, 2002; Atkinson, 2003;
Lees, 2003; Atkinson and Bridge, 2005; Butler and Lees, 2006). No longer restricted to
older neighborhoods in the largest cities of North America, Europe, and Australia, or
other centers of advanced capitalism, gentrification now represents a “global urban strat-
egy” for municipalities, planners, and city builders around the world. In addition to the
cases documented in the global survey presented by Atkinson and Bridge (2005), which
includes cities in Eastern Europe, Brazil, Turkey, and Japan, we can add Singapore
(Wong, 2006), Puebla (Jones and Varley, 1999), Shanghai (He and Wu, 2005), Bilbao
(Vicario and Martínez Monje, 2003), and many others as urban centers that have attracted
the attention of gentrification researchers. Needless to say, the experiences of gentrifica-
tion and the kinds of landscapes produced by gentrification vary dramatically from city to
city, but the generalization of the process as a central strategy of urban development is the
central point. Thus numerous authors have connected this latest evolution of gentrifica-
tion with the transformation from the Keynesian to the neoliberal city (e.g., Brenner and
Theodore, 2002; Newman and Ashton, 2004). In other words, the most recent waves of
gentrification are intricately entwined within the circuits of global capital and culture.
At various scales, the state plays a crucial role in this generalization of gentrification,
and as the process has been integrated into the broader urban economy, it has also been
transformed, not least discursively. The development of large mega-projects in central
cities, often providing retail and recreational facilities as well as residences, is part of this
general wave of gentrification, but so too is “urban regeneration” (Smith, 2002). Urban
regeneration represents the core of the European Union’s urban strategy in the early years
of the 21st century, and if for no other reason than that it opens the sluice gates to gener-
ous EU funding, national governments throughout the EU have followed suit. Cities, in
turn, confronted by the white heat of global economic competition that is less and less
filtered through national borders, adopt these policies for the same reasons (Cameron,
2003).
A new globalism, therefore, induces, and is induced by, a new neoliberal urbanism,
and this has several facets. In terms of capital investment, cities—more specifically, the
processes of city building—have become a more concentrated locus of capital accumula-
tion than they were previously. Shanghai is perhaps the leading edge and extreme case
(He and Wu, 2005), but urban land economies generally are attracting accelerating quan-
tities of capital devoted to the production of the built environment, and gentrification is a
crucial element of this process. In terms of new discourses of urban transformation, the
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 279

language of regeneration becomes a powerful ideological tool. Especially in Britain,

where academic criticism of the deleterious effects of gentrification is largely stilled
(Slater, 2006), the class-specific contours of urban restructuring are obscured in favor of
the naturalistic, eco-medical metaphor of “regeneration.” The new urbanism also
remakes the city as an arena of consumption. The emphasis here is no longer on the kind
of collective consumption that Manuel Castells (1977) pictured in his efforts at a theoret-
ical definition of the urban, but strictly in the individualist, market terms appropriate for
a neoliberal world. The links between gentrification, consumption spaces, and cultural
strategies of city building are now well established (Zukin, 1995, 1998; Mullins et al.,
1999).
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Tourism intrinsically links global and local processes (Teo and Li, 2003) and in recent
years it too has grown into a major “urban economic development strategy” (Hoffman et
al., 2003, p. 13). Local elites explicitly encourage tourism as a harbinger of windfall
profits for local businesses, a lever for economic reinvestment in urban infrastructure, a
source of jobs, and a potential generator of additional property tax revenue. As with tour-
ism in general, urban tourism is inherently contradictory. While potentially promoting
cultural and geographical differentiation through “the production of local distinctiveness,
local cultures, and different local histories that appeal to visitors’ tastes for the exotic and
unique” (Fox Gotham , 2005, p. 1102), urban tourism is just as powerful a force for
homogeneity and standardization (Teo and Yeoh, 1997, p. 196; Hoffman et al., 2003, pp.
246–250). Tourist landscapes are the product of this contradiction, but also of sometimes
intense local struggles over the representation of the city: which parts of its past are to be
remembered and which erased, what kind of future is to be constructed, and for whom?
To the extent that the making of tourist landscapes embodies the neoliberal economic
logic of commodified difference, market segmentation, and a consumable multicultural-
ism—and engages international developers, architects, and corporate tenants—the capi-
talist market tends to resolve these contradictions in the direction of a banal placelessness.
Whether banal or productive of social and cultural differences, the gentrification of
potential tourist destinations—or the gentrification of cities in hopes of making them
tourist destinations—unites production and consumption practices in the new urban land-
scape. Kevin Fox Gotham (2005) proposes the concept of “tourism gentrification” to
explain the transformation of an urban neighborhood into “a relatively affluent and exclu-
sive enclave marked by a proliferation of corporate entertainment and tourism venues”
(pp. 1102–1103). More generally, “the changing flows of capital into the real estate
market combined with the growth of tourism enhance the significance of consumption-
oriented activities in residential space and encourage gentrification” (p. 1099). The result
is a “blurring of entertainment, commercial activity and residential space,” which “leads
to an altered relationship between culture and economics in the production and consump-
tion of urban space” (p. 1115). This formulation has the advantage of highlighting the
twin processes of globalization and localization while at the same time providing a
“conceptual link between production-side and demand-side explanations of gentrification
while avoiding one-sided and reductive conceptions” (pp. 1102–1103).
Atkinson (2003, p. 2346) rightly frets that, in the UK context, the adoption of gentrifi-
cation strategies as the centerpiece of neoliberal urban policy raises the “possibility of a
new round of community dislocation” (Atkinson, 2003, p. 2346). Despite the abundance
of research on gentrification, there is a dearth of work on its most dire effect—the
 280 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

displacement and dispersal of long-time residents evicted physically or economically as

a result of renovations, demolition, rent increases, and other legal and illegal practices
(Haraguchi, 2006; Newman and Wyly, 2006). Researchers still do not have a good
picture of where displaced residents of gentrification are moved to, or the effects of
displacement on their employment, livelihood, or community support systems (Smith,
1996; Atkinson, 2000). We have an even fuzzier picture of the effects of gentrification on
the displacement of work and jobs (Curran, 2004). Slater et al. (2004, p. 1142) suggest
two reasons for this lack of research. The first is methodological, namely the difficulty of
tracking down long-gone displacees; the second involves researchers’ own social posi-
tionality. The leap of perspective required to see the world as a displaced person is signif-
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icant, and researchers’ own dependence on the state for research grants and policy
consultancies surely plays a role as well. This raises a third crucial issue. Insofar as the
state at various scales adopts gentrification as a housing policy, in whole or in part, it has
little self-interest in collecting the kind of data that documents the level of displacement
and the fate of displacees, data that would be tantamount to exposing the failure of these
policies.
A systematic backlash against critical analyses of gentrification is increasingly evident
with some researchers attempting to minimize the prevalence, significance, or even exist-
ence of displacement resulting from gentrification (Hamnett, 2003, p. 2402; Freeman,
2006). This is not the place to debate these claims (Slater, 2006). Suffice it to say that
insofar as the gentrification literature yields disparate arguments, the need for solid data
is even greater, and this paper offers some evidence from Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Our research focuses on Los Llanos, a waterfront community on the south bank of
Santa Cruz’s center. The main sources used for this research have been the Santa Cruz
City Hall Records for the period 1959–1965, when the earliest redevelopment projects
were hatched, and the Survey on buildings and families affected by expropriations
(Inventario, 1958), elaborated by the subsequent “Maritime Avenue Sector Plan.” The
Survey contains exceptionally rich data on buildings and households involved in the
project, recording the number of individuals and families displaced (a “last-resident dis-
placement” measure) together with the head of household’s occupation. City Hall
Records provide information about the expropriation process itself, the City practices, the
opposition of those expropriated, and City policy concerning displacement and reloca-
tion. Furthermore, although the population was dispersed to several neighborhoods
beginning over 30 years ago, the old neighborhood’s Regla Virgin Church remains a very
popular meeting place for displaced residents as well as for members of the Los Llanos
Friends Association. In-depth interviews were conducted with several members of the
Association at the church between November 17 and December 6, 2001. These inter-
views used a structured questionnaire covering living conditions in Los Llanos, neighbor-
hood celebrations, evictions, and broader social consequences.

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF URBAN SPACE

Judd and Fainstein (1999) describe three distinct models of urban engagement with
tourism: resort cities, tourist-historic cities, and “converted” cities. The first two catego-
ries are self-evident; the converted city, by contrast, refers to cities that have rebuilt their
existing infrastructure for the explicit purpose of attracting tourists and visitors. Santa
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 281

TABLE 1. SOME ECONOMIC INDICATORS OF CANARY ISLANDS (2002)

European Union
(N = 25) Spain Canary Islands

2001 population 452,990,300 41,837,894 1,843,755

Size (km2) 3,975,000 505,182 7,447
GNP (millions Euros) 9,170,420 696,208 27,913
Unemployment rate (%) 7.6 11.5 11.1
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Employees with a contract of limited duration (%) 10.9 39.0 31

Cost labor worker/year (€) 28,944 23,365 19,326
2003 population under poverty line (%) 15 19 18.7
Tourists number 167,800,000 52,326,767 10,759,156
Hotel and apartment beds 12,734,000 1,352,200 381,537
Construction active population (%) 6.4 11.8 13.2
Services active population (%) 21.6 28.6 30.5

Sources: Data taken from the website of EUROSTAT; Institute of Tourist Studies and INE (Spanish Insti-
tute of Statistics).

Cruz de Tenerife could be included among the so-called “converted cities,” but its tourist
space is not insulated from the larger urban milieu (Judd, 1999). Rather, the tourist dis-
tricts around the central city waterfront are thoroughly mixed with the rest of the urban
core, quite characteristic of European cities, and are therefore also an important space for
residents (Judd, 2003; Terhorst et al., 2003). At the same time, the south bank of the
waterfront has been systematically reconstructed to accommodate high-end residential
apartments, some hotels, and commercial, leisure, and cultural facilities; former indus-
trial areas of deteriorated building stock are being reproduced as places of consumption.
A wealthy, urban-based tourist flow aimed at the Canaries developed during the 19th
century, with visitors arriving in passenger ships. From the early 20th century onward, the
islands were linked to established Atlantic and Mediterranean tourist routes, first through
combined fruit and tourist cruises and then through specialized tourist charters organized
by European shipping companies, and with departures from such ports as Liverpool,
Southampton, Marseille, and Bordeaux (Vera Galván, 1989). Since the early 1960s, the
Canary Islands have experienced an extraordinary growth in tourism and, by 2004, they
had become the second-most–visited Spanish destination for foreign tourists (Informe
Anual, 2004), overwhelming other world tourist destinations such as Singapore, Hawai’i,
Cancún, or Chipre (Cáceres Morales, 2001, p. 47; Teo and Li, 2003, p. 292). Tourism
is the most important component of the islands’ economy, representing 32.6% of the
Canaries’ GNP and 37.3% of total employment in 2003 (Informe Anual, 2004). Visited
by 10, 7 million tourists in 2002, the Canaries received 20.6% of all Spanish tourism
(Table 1). The Canaries’ economy is therefore highly specialized and tourism-dependent:
tourist flow and associated real estate construction, development, and management are its
leading sectors. In the early postwar period, local landowner-developers effectively
 282 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

appropriated skyrocketing land rents through the sale of buildings and land and, since the
1990s, those with more capital and expertise have moved into lucrative coalitions with
national and international tourist firms (Martín Martín, 1999).
The provincial capitals, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, were
the main cities and major port destinations in the islands, with cruise tourism peaking in
the postwar period. The spectacular 1960s expansion of tourism was fueled by charter
flights, encouraging mass tourism and an intensification of tourist-oriented urbanization.
Las Palmas remained the primary tourist center, but it was now joined by Puerto de la
Cruz on Tenerife’s northwestern coast. Since the mid-1970s, capital investment in tour-
ism has increasingly moved to the southern coast of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, trigger-
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ing resort urbanism concentrated in new geographic clusters and, by the late 1980s, these
new developments sprawled along most of the Canaries’ coastlines. The majority of tour-
ists come in winter from northern Europe, whereas mainland Spanish tourism occurs
largely during summer.
Until recently, regional elites championed “sun-and-beach” mass tourism, taking
advantage of low airfares, and the Canary Islands became a world leader in the industry
(Soja, 2005). The rapidity and intensity of tourist investment, however, and the obsoles-
cence of aging apartments and hotels caused considerable oversupply by the beginning
of this decade, and regional governments responded by diversifying into new market
segments such as the convention business, urban tourism, golf, health, and cruise tourism
(Informe Anual, 2004).
In the entire Canaries archipelago, most cities have populations below 40,000. Santa
Cruz de Tenerife is one of only three cities containing a population of more than 100,000,
the others being Las Palmas and La Laguna (also on Tenerife). Santa Cruz de Tenerife is
not so much a tourist city as the capital of a tourist province, a scalar development also
observed recently by Fainstein (2005). Yet it shares much with tourist urbanization (Table
2): the predominance of the services sector and commerce, high unemployment rate, the
predominance of micro-businesses in retail trade, below-average wages (84.5% of the
average for Spain), and a preponderance of temporary employment (90.3%; Informe
Anual, 2001). Indicating the extent of inequality, high GNP growth rates coincide with
high poverty rates (27.1% in 1996). By comparison with so-called world cities, Santa Cruz
de Tenerife may seem like an outpost of the northwestern coast of Africa, but in the past
few decades it has experienced the same kinds of social, economic, political, and cultural
transformation as other cities more directly tied into the circuits of global capital.
In the case of Santa Cruz, much of the impetus for internal restructuring has come
from the global connections afforded first and foremost by the tourist industry. This does
not make Santa Cruz unique, but quite the opposite. From New York to Vancouver to
Amsterdam, tourism has been a major force behind gentrification, yet Santa Cruz resem-
bles more closely such non–North American cities as Rio de Janeiro, Havana, San Juan,
and Granada in Spain where gentrification is not yet so widespread but, conversely,
where tourism is an increasingly important element in contemporary urban redevelop-
ment. The restructuring of Santa Cruz, the capital of Tenerife province, rests heavily on
contemporary strategies of urban marketing and gentrification connected to the tourist
industry as well as to city commercial development and the expansion of CBD. These
processes are all responsible for reworking the connections between power, justice, and
spatiality in the urban landscape.
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 283

TABLE 2. SOCIOECONOMIC AND DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE OF

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE’S POPULATION IN 1950 AND 1996

Santa Cruz de Tenerife 1950 1996

Population 103,110 203,787

Population over 65 years (%) 4.7 12
Unemployment rate (%) n.a 26
Illiteracy (%) 32.68 18.3
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Low-medium income households (%) n.a. 46.8

Population primary sector (%) 14.3 1.9
Population secondary sector (%) 35.4 21.1
Population tertiary sector (%) 50.3 77

Sources: Reseña Estadística (1959), Murcia Navarro (1975), and Díaz Rodríguez et al. (2002).

Much as it responds to present economic and social forces, the impetus behind
contemporary urban restructuring also dates back to the 1950s when a comprehensive,
centrally planned redevelopment program was instituted. There are really two contrasting
periods of urban political and economic change in the city over the last half-century. First,
there is the 1950s urban renewal initiative under the authoritarian Franco regime. In this
period, urban renewal projects were also realized in other Spanish cities. The Plan de la
Ribera (1970) aimed to transform the Barcelona waterfront into a high-quality tourist area
(Solá-Morales et al., 1974; Tatjer Mir, 1988). Twenty years later, the newly developed
Olympic Port and residential developments blanket the area.
In the authoritarian period, highly centralized government institutions such as the
planning department held the power of spatial change. Outside government, these institu-
tions would only respond, if at all, to right-wing political organizations connected to the
regime. There was little if any meaningful public debate over the goals, means, and geog-
raphies of urban renewal, and although there was some spontaneous response to the
plans, it was quite limited. Nonetheless, various legal and economic problems delayed the
implementation of the 1950s plan and curtailed its effectiveness. A second major urban
restructuring initiative occurred during the 1990s, launched by a democratic local govern-
ment intimately tied into the global circuits of neoliberal policy-making. This initiative
embodied formal, but very constrained and deliberative public processes. It focused on
those pockets of disinvested properties that remained in the core and also the previously
industrial land near the city center, while simultaneously encouraging private market
rehabilitation of the old central housing stock. This most recent initiative has been met by
broad public acquiescence. The elected political left has mostly continued the 1990s
urban restructuring program, and there has been little popular protest over the gentrifica-
tion of central Santa Cruz, reflecting a wider political abstentionism in the city. The only
exceptions are a small merchants’ coalition, located in the old urban center, that has
especially targeted the concentration of large national and multinational stores in the
 284 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

renovated commercial district, and the popular left wing coalition Izquierda Unida. The
latter in particular has pointed toward the social injustice involved in the redevelopment
of the El Cabo-Los Llanos district adjacent to the central city. Before discussing the most
recent redevelopment, we need to explore the first phase of redevelopment in the 1950s.

1950S URBAN REDEVELOPMENT

The first city plan, proposed in 1951 and approved six years later, was in many ways
an attempt to rationalize a new mix of land uses via a reconstruction and reorganization
of the city’s geography, but it embodied a contradiction between its analysis and its
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prescriptions. Planners knew there was an estimated low-income housing shortage of

about 7,000 units (approximately 20% of the city’s total households), and could observe
the construction of self-help housing that had consequently mushroomed at the periphery,
unmatched by the provision of even basic services such as roads, water, and sewers.
Rather than preparing serviced land for low-income self-help housing, as planners recom-
mended, the city proposed a huge urban renewal of the old city (García Herrera, 1981);
when this was finally implemented in 1958, the plan’s major focus was the central trian-
gle of Santa Cruz contained between the mountains to the north, the coast to the south,
and the Santos ravine to the west (Fig. 1).
Through the plan, the city government made itself the major economic, political, and
ideological agent of urban redevelopment beginning in the late 1950s. The plan expressed
a decidedly hierarchical conception of urban order and a sharp divide between the “city”
and its peripheral extension. Focusing on the area between the Santos Ravine and the
Ramblas—the neighborhoods of Los Llanos and El Cabo—the plan proposed a citywide
urban renewal of the old city, intended as simultaneously physical and symbolic. In the
El Cabo district, immediately south of the city center, the major tool of intervention in the
early 1960s was the Maritime Avenue Sector Plan. This plan’s intention was to destroy
the dilapidated working-class neighborhoods close to the port, open up several wider
streets back into the old city, and energetically rebuild the area as a concentrated zone of
commercial and administrative activity linked to the port’s growing tourist industry.
Newspaper reports from the early 1960s suggest the demand for tourist development:
with only 13 hotels in Santa Cruz, the city government advanced subsidies to firms build-
ing hotels, while the mayor announced a plan to develop the Anaga Hills for tourist facil-
ities including hotels. A parallel effort sought to beautify the city to attract tourists.
Quickly following an announced project for a 20,000-visitor tourist center that would
include several hotels (Plan Parcial, 1961; Pulido Mañes, 1979), the 1962 announcement
by the city that it would construct Las Teresitas beach nearby, several kilometers north
along the coast from the city, further cemented the connection between redevelopment
and tourism. Meanwhile, the proposed enlargement of a centrally located electric power
station was rejected as unsuitable, but a tourist hotel in Las Mesas Mountain was
approved “in order to provide convenient lodging to meet a steady increase of tourist flow
to the city” (Actas, 1959–1965, session of April 19, 1963).
With the mayor calling for a greater sensitivity to the esthetics of new buildings, the
overall ambition was to produce a new urban space that was “most representative of the
city” (Actas, 1959–1965, session of September 21, 1962). But urban renovation also
meant a revalorization, and by 1969 the highest land prices, which were historically
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 285
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Fig. 1. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Urban projects.

 286 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

TABLE 3. PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN EL CABO–LOS LLANOS PLAN

Expenditure categories Pesetas %

Expropriations 99,057,926 28.0

Compensation to official facilities 31,600,000 8.9
Indemnity to businesses and industries 10,000,000 2.8
New housing for families affected 114,386,232 32.4
Urbanization works 98,926,118 27.9
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Total 353,970,276 100.0

Source: Rumeu de Armas et al. (1958).

concentrated in the old center, were pushed dramatically higher as a result of some early
renovations (García Herrera, 1981, pp. 119–120). Different neighborhoods played differ-
ent roles in the plan. The waterfront was supposed to provide a generous, open embank-
ment offering a welcoming entrance to the city. In the neighborhoods of La Concepción
and El Cabo, the Maritime Avenue Sector Plan proposed the construction of a new Civic
and Commercial Center divided into three zones: an administrative core, a representative
center, and a commercial center with the last including a tourist hotel. A main shopping
avenue (Bravo Murillo) would cut across both communities. The Los Llanos neighbor-
hood would be replaced by the Fair and Exhibitions zone, located between Bravo Murillo
and Maritime Avenues. A sports area was proposed for the shore. North of Bravo Murillo
Avenue a triangular area was held in reserve, possibly “to be used for housing low-
income families affected by the plan, in very scattered open buildings” (Rumeu de Armas
et al., 1958, p. 8). Industry dominated the rest of Los Llanos. High-rise buildings were
slated throughout the area, but this aspect of the plan ran into difficulty.
The 1958 plan was eventually approved but only on the condition that an amended and
more elaborate proposal be presented by the city government, and this took another seven
years. The result was a pioneering plan, but it stalled again, and other Spanish cities
seized the initiative. Much as the earlier Santa Cruz plan envisioned, the Plan de la Ribera
of the 1970s, promoted by private capital, sought “the opening of Barcelona to the sea”
(Solá-Morales et al., 1974). If the dense population of the central neighborhood of El
Cabo–Los Llanos posed a problem for such comprehensive redevelopment, it did not
significantly deter the city government. The plan covered an area of 42.1 hectares, led to
the elimination of many streets, expropriated 522 buildings and 264 small businesses, and
spent a total of 353.9 millions pesetas (ptas; Table 3).
A working-class district built on the southwestern edge of the 19th-century city, El
Cabo–Los Llanos in the late 1950s constituted a remarkable concentration of ciudadelas
(working-class tenements) and rowhouses in highly deteriorated condition. A few
merchant houses in better condition clustered around La Concepción church, where the
town’s ruling class resided during the late 16th to 18th centuries (Cioranescu, 1978).
Small industry, street amusements, and prostitution completed the picture of this port area
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 287

(García Herrera, 1981; Pérez González, 1982). Landlords capitalized on the migration of
people into the city to extract higher rents by subdividing the houses. Over 75% of dwell-
ings were privately rented, with mean numbers of persons per room reaching 2.1. This
average conceals uneven densities; the most overcrowded blocks, concentrated in Los
Llanos, averaged almost four persons per room, and several blocks exceeded that density.
Interviews with elderly residents provide a good idea of the conditions:

Interviewer: How many rooms did the house have?

Angela: Just one, it was all-in-one. The one room served as a kitchen, bathroom,
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bedroom.

Interviewer: How many people lived there?

Angela: I lived in the house with my husband and five children, but my husband
was always out in the boat, he would come and go.

Or there is the recollection of Marina: Eight people in one room. Half of them slept
in one bed and the other half on the floor. In those times, we used to take a straw
mat and blankets to make up a bed on the floor and that was it!

In 1950, population density in El Cabo–Los Llanos was extremely high, ranging up to

800 people per hectare. Overcrowded housing lacked the minimal hygienic conditions
and the infant mortality rate was very high. Overall, conditions were comparable to those
recorded in New York’s Lower East Side 50 years earlier (Hall, 1996). Inhabitants were
mainly industrial and port workers, but also fishermen (4.6%), and a cluster of better-off
clerical workers occupied houses around La Concepción church. Many women were
housewives (“non-active” in the city survey’s 1958 classification), but also worked in the
city’s informal economy with, for example, fishermen’s wives in Los Llanos commonly
selling fish in the streets. The bulk of family breadwinners were unskilled workers—so-
called jornaleros—who accounted for 30.3%. These unskilled workers undertook the
hardest tasks in the port (loading ships with bananas, potatoes, and tomatoes; unloading
wheat, flour, and cement) and the most menial jobs in the chemical and soap factories and
electric generation plant. Almost 19% of those expropriated were empleados, including
clerical workers for port and shipping companies, and those occupied in the retail trade.
Craftsmen amounted to more than 10% of the active population, indicating the existence
of many small workshops scattered through the old city devoted to tobacco manufactur-
ing, carpentry, shoe repair, baking, and the like. Cleaners, domestic servants, barbers, and
others working in personal services made up 6.9%.
In comparison to other working-class port neighborhoods, rents in El Cabo–Los
Llanos were low (Tatjer Mir, 1988), averaging 114 ptas/month in the early 1960s, but
actual rents varied widely. Blocks with average rent below 60 ptas/month, usually with
over three persons to a room, were disproportionately concentrated in Los Llanos. Not
surprisingly, greater overcrowding was therefore associated with the lowest average
rents, whereas the opposite obtained in the blocks closest to the commercial core where
higher rents corresponded with lower overcrowding. Overall, this profile of the occupa-
tions, poverty, and inferior housing conditions of those displaced by the early Santa Cruz
 288 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

plan resembles the portrait of displacees elsewhere in the gentrification and displacement
literature (e.g., Le Gates and Hartman, 1986).

THE DISPLACEMENT PROCESS

Expropriation was a long process lasting over 15 years. When it was completed, the El
Cabo–Los Llanos plan had evicted 1,253 households, a total of 5,518 inhabitants. At first,
the city planned to re-house these displaced residents in the same or nearby neighbor-
hoods, recognizing their right to remain locally, but this commitment dissolved as the
plan progressed and the city government increasingly relied on new peripheral public
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housing to accommodate the displaced. City Hall established a “Public Land Bank,”
funded by state as well as municipal money, to finance and administer a wide expropria-
tion and demolition of property in this central zone. Four hundred families were to be
evicted in 1962 alone, all to the periphery. To make matters worse, some of the public
housing projects to which people were relocated in the 1960s also deteriorated rapidly
and were demolished in the 1990s, forcing additional displacement.
The political authoritarianism of the Franco period at first prevented open resistance to
urban policy, but there is evidence of discontent and opposition to the expropriations. In
the first place, displacees made administrative claims against the city. There were very
few such claims in the 1950s, when authoritarianism was particularly intense, and these
were filed only by industrial capitalists and some larger property owners. But by 1974,
the number of claims for compensation increased to more than 40 and many owners and
businessmen now pursued legal action.
Owners and tenants embarked on different routes of opposition: owners appealed to
the Expropriation Provincial Jury, while tenants refused eviction until the city forced
them out. Citing the location-specific nature of their work, Los Llanos fishermen
demanded new housing in the same waterfront neighborhood and even demonstrated.

Interviewer: Did you ask the Council to build new homes for you closer to where
you had lived?

Maria Isabel: We did. We went, the fishermen’s people, we all went to the City
Council asking them to build some little houses for the fishermen.

Andrea: They even went to mainland Spain [meaning the Madrid government] ask-
ing for money to help build new houses for the fishermen.

Angela: All the people from Los Llanos took part in the demonstration; the women
even marched all the way from Los Llanos to the Council.

Newspapers provided no coverage of the demonstrations and City Hall refused their
demand ostensibly because the plan allocated other uses for the neighborhood.
The evictions affected social groups differently. Some landowners and members of the
local bourgeoisie who lived in the old commercial core of Cuadrilátero or owned busi-
nesses there were displaced quite early when the main commercial streets (Bethencourt
Alfonso and Villalba Hervás) were widened and rebuilt with nine-storey buildings later
occupied by offices and commerce. Away from these main streets, this population was
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 289

TABLE 4. POPULATION CHANGE IN EL CABO–LOS LLANOS–LA CONCEPCIÓN 1955–1980

Years Loss of population

1955– 1960– 1965– 1970– % decreasing

1955 1960 1965 1970 1980 1960 1965 1970 1980 1955–1980

Los Llanos 3,036 2,212 1,016 1,010 178 824 1,196 6 832 9,413
El Cabo 2,410 2,260 1,333 611 210 150 927 722 401 913
Concepción 1,593 1,875 1,226 1,058 774 +282 649 168 284 514
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Total 7,039 6,347 3,575 2,679 1,162

Source: City Census, City Hall Archive, Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

less affected. Municipal records reveal a small group of land and building owners
possessing multiple structures, suggesting considerable property concentration by pros-
perous families. The city’s eminent domain procedures undervalued these properties for
purposes of compensation, but it was the thousands of working-class tenants of El Cabo,
Los Llanos, and the La Concepción neighborhood, evicted and displaced to public hous-
ing on the outskirts, who bore the greatest brunt of displacement. By 1970, Los Llanos
had lost two-thirds of its population, and El Cabo three-quarters; La Concepción, the less
affected zone, lost one-third of its inhabitants. A decade later, the two former neighbor-
hoods had disappeared whereas La Concepción was half its previous size (Table 4).
Social displacement and demolition were not always followed by timely physical
reconstruction, and in the working-class neighborhoods especially many of the projected
plans from 1958 were never even implemented. As late as the 1990s, these areas were still
dominated by many empty lots and decaying properties. Looking specifically at the
Maritime Avenue Sector portion of the plan, demolition there proceeded swiftly, but only
in 1970 did the city government request a reconstruction plan. It was approved by the
Ministry of Housing in 1975 but rejected by a local business owners group who appealed
it all the way to the Supreme Court. The plan’s architectural design envisaged massive
buildings covering most of the surface area of the large lots assembled after demolition,
but this excluded local owners who rarely had the necessary capital to participate in such
large projects. Their central complaint focused on a planned 24-storey building, owned
by the Urban Property Chamber, which exceeded the height limits for the site but more
importantly it exhausted the total built space permitted in the vicinity. Under the planning
protocols, the remaining property in the hands of local business owners could only be
assigned as parking lots. In 1982, the Supreme Court sided with the local owners, arguing
further that City Hall’s announcement of the 24-storey building marked the end of the
expropriation phase of the plan.
In this early period, urban “renewal” in Santa Cruz was more realistically a form of
urban destruction, both intended and otherwise. This calls into question the claim that
benefits to the city justified the requisite social costs: if it was creative destruction, then
creativity only came decades later. In the meantime, eviction had a far broader effect on
 290 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

local residents’ lives than simply their residential location. Small business owners lost not
just their business but the value attached to their business location, and workers experi-
enced greater transport costs from the periphery vis-á-vis employment opportunities,
resources, and services. Many also lost their jobs and sources of livelihood, for example,
fisherman. As expressed in the laments of displaced residents, they shared an awareness
of the lost advantages of living near the city center and seashore:

Andrea: Very sad. To be honest, it is very sad. Because when I lived here I could
walk to the marketplace, everything was within walking distance for me. When I
moved I had to go by bus.
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Maria Isabel: Same goes for me. Here we had the beach, we had schools.… I went
to the school in El Cabo, you see? We would walk to school and come back through
what we called “Victoriano’s path.” We used to cross the motorway to get to school
in El Cabo. We used to walk all the way back from school. Those were our school
days, you see? We would come here for a swim on the beach. School in the morn-
ing, out at half past four and then off to the beach. That was year round, winter and
summer.

More than the changed material conditions of daily life were at stake when the evicted
residents expressed their sense of loss:

Interviewer: Did the families’ situation change after the move?

Andrea: It didn’t get better. My mother didn’t last long, she was so sad.… She
lasted very little, we moved in 1972 and she died in 1975, she saw everything she
had taken from her.

Maria Isabel: They didn’t die because they were old, no, but ’cos they were heart-
broken, you know? They had lived here all their lives.… I was only a little eight-
year-old girl, I used to cry so much every time I came to Los Llanos with my
Granny, I cried so much.

More than two decades have elapsed since the last residents were evicted yet they still
feel a powerful belonging belonging to their former neighborhood, even if it is no longer
recognizable:

Interviewer: Where do you feel you belong today, your current neighborhood or
Los Llanos?

Maria Isabel: I belong in Los Llanos. Let me tell you something. If I was asked
where I come from, I would say I’m from Los Llanos. I may live in Chimisay but I
am from Los Llanos. I have said that many times, if I was given a house now, even
after so many years and even now I have kids, I would move back here without so
much as a second thought.

Angela: I would even swap my current house for one down here. Definitely! Every-
one from Los Llanos regrets having left this place, I wish we hadn’t left! I wish they
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 291

had built new houses here for us instead of all they have done just to make money,
you get me? They could have built a small community for the fishermen, for the
locals.

The city government was not wholly unsympathetic. Displaced families were suppos-
edly offered minimal compensation if they lived in an expropriated home and were eligi-
ble for a 2,000-peseta subsidy toward moving expenses. Interviews with displaced
residents, however, suggest that this compensation was often never paid:

Interviewer: Did you get any form of compensation after the land was expropri-
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ated?

Andrea: Who? Us? No way! I paid for everything myself! We had to pay 25,000
pesetas to be allowed to leave and get our new homes. I had to pay the water bill
and electricity, I don’t remember how much it was anymore … but we had to pay
all that ourselves. The Council never gave us any help!

Marina: We were forced out and, on top of that, had to pay 25,000 pesetas to get the
keys for our new house. Our properties were taken from us and [gives name of a
politician] was the one who tricked us, because we could have paid nothing at all.

The apparently farsighted plan to link Santa Cruz’s redevelopment with tourist boost-
erism was frustrated not only by the sluggishness of reinvestment but by competition
from an unexpected source—intense capital investment in wholly new tourist complexes
on the southern rim of the island. In 1967, the city had 4,000 hotel rooms, 22% of the
Tenerife total, and its port received a foreign tourist flow of 10,126 people (1969 figure;
Murcia Navarro, 1975; Martín Martín, 1999). By the 1990s, its share of hotel rooms had
fallen to 1.5% of the island total (2,365 rooms) yet it had a tourist flow of 167,425 visitors
(Dossier, 1999). Despite having cleared the land, in other words, despite the reconstruc-
tion of the waterfront and the building of the City Auditorium and Convention Center in
the 1980s and 1990s as visible symbols of a new urban identity (Dom Bedu, 2001), and
despite the reconstruction of a central commercial zone and the gentrification of the
neighborhood housing that survived the plan, city leaders were unable to translate the
opportunity into the gentrified tourist space envisioned four decades earlier. Tourists
were coming to and leaving from Santa Cruz but not necessarily staying in the city.

1990S REDEVELOPMENT AND GENTRIFICATION

As the larger reconstruction projects took precedence, the El Cabo–Los Llanos and La
Concepción neighborhoods experienced heightened disinvestment. At the beginning of
the 1990s, only 37% of buildings in the historical center were occupied and, between
1984 and 1994, the number of vacant homes and stores rose by 95%. Demographic
decline, drug trafficking, and rising crime were the social corollaries. Zona Centro, a
merchants’ organization, pressured the city government to act, emphasizing especially
the importance of constructing large stores, and a new redevelopment and gentrification
initiative resulted. Announced in 1994, the new plan focused on the architectural and
economic “revitalization” of the housing stock in the old central area, and it was to be
 292 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

included under a larger grant request to the European Union’s Urban Initiative program.
The grant aimed at completing the “revitalization” of the entire city core carried a price
tag of 2,231 million pesetas (US$15.4 million). It had several different facets: (1) Trans-
formation of the historical city center into a pedestrian zone, complemented by several
privately managed underground parking lots and a new Transport station in El Cabo-Los
Llanos, rendering the entire central area a large “open” shopping mall. (2) Environmental
rehabilitation of city squares with trees and green space. (3) Physical rehabilitation of
public properties in La Concepción, an historic district, private façade rehabilitation, and a
tourist-commercial pedestrian path connecting the gentrifying El Toscal neighborhood
northeast of the old city with El Cabo-Los Llanos to the southwest. (4) Economic mod-
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ernization, employment workshops, and training sessions.

The successful application to the European Union underwrote the reconstruction and
gentrification in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, illustrating the larger theoretical point that, by
the 1990s, gentrification had been adopted as state urban strategy (Smith and DeFilippis,
1999; Smith, 2002). In the case of Santa Cruz, the city’s mayor, Miguel Zerolo, was an
energetic proponent of this integration of neighborhood change with transnational politi-
cal–economic agendas. This agenda has several political and spatial dimensions. First,
the urban reconstruction program is fueled by interurban competition, especially vis-á-vis
the city’s traditional rivalry with Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, capital of the eastern
Canary Islands. Second, in a clear continuity of the 1957 renewal plan, the city’s recon-
struction is closely linked to the commercial and tourist economy, and even if it will not
replace Las Palmas as the major tourist city of the Canaries, it is striving to become the
leading commercial center of the Islands. Hence the strong support by the business class
for large-store development as part of Santa Cruz’s reconstruction, City Hall’s threat to
rewrite legislation in favor of more large stores in the central city, and the mayor’s appeal
that stores eschew longstanding tradition and open on Saturday afternoons. Third, the
ambitious reconstruction of the central zone aims to provide an attractive urban destina-
tion for visitors and investors alike. El Cabo–Los Llanos redevelopment, Urban Initiative
historic rehabilitation, new cultural and leisure facilities, tourist-residential developments
at Las Teresitas Beach, and the transformation of the port from a freight and passenger
terminal to a cruise-ship destination and yacht marina—all of these suggest an extension
and intensification of the strategy first proposed in the 1950s. Fourth, the gentrification of
remaining centrally located pockets of derelict land and the redevelopment of industrial
zones on the edge of the city (e.g., the old oil and gas storage area south of Los Llanos)
for new commercial and residential uses, further completes and extends the class facelift
of the city.
As the tourist gateway to the old city, the waterfront is a particularly strategic location,
and the geography of its reconstruction is as varied as its financing. The contrast between
El Cabo–Los Llanos and La Concepción is especially suggestive of the interweaving
between microgeographies of urban restructuring and the international variations in
agents and financial sources of change. Redevelopment in newly affluent El Cabo–Los
Llanos is taking place on municipal land acquired during or after the 1950s expropriation,
and on private industrial land reconverted for residential and tertiary uses, on the other
(Fig. 2). Redevelopment on municipal land comprises some new construction of mostly
high-rise residential buildings erected on plots bought at auctions and other deals
from the municipality or from intermediaries (including the Ministry of Defense). The
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 293
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Fig. 2. View of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. At the forefront, maquette of El Cabo–Los Llanos redevelopment
(La Opinion).

developers are private and operate at both the national and international scale, usually
from the mainland (Vallehermoso, Ferrovial, Urbis) for whom El Cabo–Los Llanos was
their first entrée into Santa Cruz. A substantial amount of public funds, including
European Union money, has been invested in this area, but it is largely restricted to non-
residential projects such as a leisure park and the Auditorium and Convention Center,
which are stylistically consistent with the neighboring Transport Station and the new
symbolic space of the Canarian government headquarters.
In La Concepción, by contrast, EU funding dominates, combined with public funding.
An old neighborhood whose housing stock survived the bulldozer of urban renewal, La
Concepción is strategically located between El Cabo–Los Llanos to the south and the
commercial center and redesigned port to the north. The reconstruction of this neighbor-
hood fits more with the classic form of rehabilitation and gentrification than El Cabo–Los
Llanos. Whereas smaller local developers were largely eclipsed in El Cabo–Los Llanos,
La Concepción allows more room for small developers and there are signs that a modest
but growing group of professionals is interested in moving into the area. La Concepción
is also attracting a growing range of chic restaurants, bars, and nightspots, although the
process remains at an early stage. The construction of the projected Oscar Domínguez
Institute of Contemporary Art, next to the Man and Nature Museum, will give additional
impetus to the whole process. Rising property values can be predicted as a result of this
concentrated investment in real estate as well as cultural and consumption spaces.
All of this activity has had a demonstrable effect on the Santa Cruz property market,
with unprecedented price increases for residential and commercial properties. Home
prices in Santa Cruz increased 20% alone during the first three months of 1998 to a record
high of 144,600 ptas/m2 (US$1,000). Much of this has been driven by capital flowing
in from the mainland, where prices are generally higher, while financial corporations
operating in the Canarian Investment Reserve have also begun to speculate on property in
 294 GARCÍA HERRERA ET AL.

El Cabo–Los Llanos. As the city’s mayor has recently argued, “this has produced a new
phenomenon in Santa Cruz. Big mainland real estate companies and developers have
landed here and have bought land at higher prices than local developers can afford. This
has produced a higher land price increase” (Diario de Avisos, March 6, 1999).
Today in Los Llanos, more than 30 years after the initial demolitions, many displaced
residents who were scattered to the periphery and beyond gather every year in the old
neighborhood. Having experienced firsthand the contradiction between market and place
(Hannigan, 1995, p. 162), expelled from their old community, and having struggled to
keep their identity as llaneros alive, they assemble for the annual neighborhood celebra-
tion at the Church of Regla Virgin. Every September 8, in an extraordinary demonstration
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of the resilience of social claims to place and the power of symbolic (re)appropriations of
space, the image of the Regla Virgin is paraded over the former streetgrid of the erased
neighborhood as if to deny the new developments that have transformed the place they
still claim as their own. After the construction of a new road in the 1990s which cut across
the former neighborhood, they had to adapt again, changing the traditional parade route:

Marina: Well, imagine, we were so happy.… We came all the way here from so far
away.… There was only the little church, the abattoir and the Black Castle, that was
all. But we were so happy to come down, from so far away … by bus. We would
get off at the petrol station and walk down here, where we would meet up. Do you
know what we used to call the Masses that were held? The “weeping and kissing”
Masses, because we only met up once a year.

CONCLUSION

The long-term perspective adopted in this study highlights the intimate connection
between gentrification and displacement, fueled by the tourist economy. The large-scale
urban destruction of the El Cabo–Los Llanos, and to a lesser extent La Concepción, dis-
tricts in the 1960s and 1970s directly facilitated the larger-scale gentrification, real estate
boom, and housing price inflation in this and neighboring areas three decades later. The
affluent, upper-middle-class conquest of the area may be well separated in time from the
removal of port workers, factory hands, fishermen, and their families, but the two events
are causally connected: without the displacement caused by the 1957 city plan, this recon-
struction could not have happened. A key element in this process has been the role of the
state at various scales, whether enforcing evictions, orchestrating demolition, or under-
writing and subsidizing reinvestment.
Like many cities, Santa Cruz de Tenerife has experienced a transition from urban
renewal and redevelopment projects in the mid-20th century toward a more ambitious,
larger-scale neoliberal gentrification of the central city today. What characterizes this
case is the unusual availability of detailed data gathered by the city stretching back nearly
five decades, especially concerning the residents displaced during earlier phases of the
plan, and the completeness of the historical vista this allows; the comparatively compact
scale of Santa Cruz also undoubtedly simplifies this task. The result is a suggestive
portrait of the changing relationship between gentrification, tourism, and displacement
over nearly half a century, indicating that quite different forms and sources of reinvest-
ment in different places and periods lead to quite different renovated landscapes and
 GENTRIFICATION IN SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE 295

social consequences. Amid the continuity of the historical experience there also are
discontinuities, most notably the difficulty of harnessing the growing tourist trade to the
longstanding ambition of central-city reconstruction, yet the city’s persisted in forging
this link even as the wider economic conditions changed.

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