The first emblematic hotel in the Canary Islands
With pieces of art
With poolheated
Center wellness
In the heartof Tazacorte
The first emblematic hotel in the Canary Islands
It was in Tazacorte where the Castilian conquerors disembarked in 1492 and established the first settlements in the Aridane valley, since the most fertile land, the river of Tazacorte or La Caldera, the only watercourse, and a coastline that allowed easy communication with the outside world, were to be found there.
Sugar cane soon became the main crop of the Hacienda de Abajo, located in Tazacorte, which is the first, oldest, richest and most productive sugar plantation on La Palma, as Professor Jesús Pérez Morera points out.
With an important mill built at the end of the 15th century or early years of the 16th century by Don Juan Fernández de Lugo, nephew of the adelantado and conqueror Don Alonso Fernández de Lugo, this plantation was bought in 1509 by the German company of the Welser family, bankers of Emperor Charles V, who in 1513 sold it to their German partners Don Jácome de Monteverde and his uncle Don Johann Biess for 8,000 gold florins. Once the sole owner of this property, with all its lands and waters from the sea to the Caldera de Taburiente, an estate which he also owned, Don Jácome de Monteverde was the main owner of La Palma (quitar coma ) thanks to the sale of the coveted sugar in Antwerp, the international centre of its trade. As a result of this frenetic commercial activity, La Palma received a collection of Flemish sculptures and paintings in the 16th century that is still the most important in the Canary Islands today.
The hacienda built by Don Jácome de Monteverde (the last sole owner of the Hacienda de Abajo) and enlarged by his heirs was an urban residential and industrial complex with a central area where the houses of the lords were located, which had their main entrance towards the east and a large balcony-viewpoint on their rear façades towards the west with great views of the sea, the sugar cane fields and the sugar mill. The interior was adorned with magnificent sumptuary and utilitarian objects imported from Flanders and Andalusia thanks to trade relations symbolised by the old mill, which was dismantled in 1840.
Over the years, other buildings were added, where the members of prominent families who, through marriage or purchase and sale, had become part of the small group of owners of the Hacienda de Abajo resided. Among these families was the House of Sotomayor Topete, lords of Lilloot, Berendrech and Zuitland in the States of Flanders, whose members, due to their outstanding qualities, the nobility of their origins, their important matrimonial alliances and the opulence of the entailed estates, played a very important role in the life of La Palma for centuries. Their origin on this island dates back to the marriage of Ana de Monteverde, granddaughter of Jácome de Monteverde, to Juan de Sotomayor Topete, a nobleman from Cáceres, whose only son, Pedro de Sotomayor Topete y Monteverde (1595-1655) (remove comma) married to the lady of Werthen in Brabant, was governor of the arms of La Palma and one of the two richest knights on the island. It was Don Pedro José de Sotomayor Topete Massieu Vandale (1689-1750), who, during his marriage to Doña Catalina Cecilia de Sotomayor Topete y Alzola, built the Casa Principal de Tazacorte, a house added to the bond that this lady founded in favour of her second son Don Nicolás José de Sotomayor Topete Massieu Vandale (1737-1814) and which has continued to be the property of his descendants.
Hispania Nostra Award for Best Practices in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (2014), Hacienda de Abajo contains more than 1,300 works of art. French and Flemish tapestries from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries (the best collection in the Canary Islands), an excellent collection of paintings dating back to the 15th century, Chinese porcelain and statues from the Tang, Ming and Qing dynasties, European religious carvings from the 16th to 18th centuries and numerous sumptuary objects make up the largest contribution of artistic heritage to La Palma since the 17th century.
El Hotel Hacienda de Abajo consta, dentro de un recinto amurallado, de cuatro edificaciones distribuidas alrededor de un jardín interior, donde antiguamente se ubicó la huerta de la hacienda.
La Casa Principal de Tazacorte, del siglo XVII, constituye un bien inmueble integrante del patrimonio histórico de Canarias. Edificada por don Pedro José de Sotomayor Topete y Massieu , fue su mujer, doña Catalina Cecilia de Sotomayor Topete y Alzola, quien agrega esta casa al vínculo que fundó a favor de su hijo segundo, en cuya descendencia se conserva actualmente.
The Hotel Hacienda de Abajo consists, within a walled enclosure, of four buildings distributed around an interior garden, where the hacienda's vegetable garden was formerly located.
The Main House of Tazacorte, from the 17th century, is a property that is part of the historical heritage of the Canary Islands. Built by Don Pedro José de Sotomayor Topete y Massieu, it was his wife, Doña Catalina Cecilia de Sotomayor Topete y Alzola, who added this house to the bond that she founded in favour of her second son, in whose descendants it is still preserved today. Its extension, with new high and low buildings, responds to the tradition of adding bodies to the primitive building that make its layout end in an L or U shape, to meet future needs, reusing wood, ashlars and stones from buildings that no longer exist: sustainable architecture.
The hacienda's old orchard, surrounded by a wall, stretched from behind the Casa Principal de Tazacorte to the present-day Casa Massieu, and in it, in addition to vegetables, trees were planted (fig, orange, lemon, quince, mulberry, etc.) and "platanales", whose existence on this estate is recorded, and also for the first time on La Palma, in the Partición Grande or de Vandale of 1613.
With the passage of time, the orchard has become a garden where exotic species from all over the world acclimatise in one of the best climates in the world, irrigated with water from the Caldera de Taburiente, now a national park.
