The Hotel Hacienda de Abajo lies within a walled enclosure and consists of four buildings looking onto an inner garden, where the estate's orchard was once located.

 

The former Casa Principal of Tazacorte was meticulously renovated between 2010 and 2012 by the architect María del Carmen Alemañ García, who removed some unbecoming architectural additions and recovered the original appearance of the house. This two-storey rectangular house, with an Arab-style tiled roof and an exceptional stove for drying cochineal, features - just like the other buildings of the former hacienda - a balcony-walkway open to the west, while its opposite façade looks onto the gardens. Two floors with balconies and two towers were lovingly added to the hacienda building, commanding magnificent views of the sea and the crop fields while highlighting the stately and almost military character of these old residences. This reflects traditional Canarian architecture, where new needs are met by extending the primitive building, normally arranged in a linear way, with successive bodies that end up forming an L-shaped or U-shaped arrangement.

 

Meanwhile, the newly constructed buildings surrounding the house respect the original layout of the hacienda and the local construction style, where residential architecture is harmoniously blended into a landscape that in the late nineteenth century shifted from predominantly sugarcane fields to banana plantations. One of them is a two-floor building with Arab-style tiled roofs and open balconies, while the other two are single-storey buildings with the same tiled roofs, one housing a pocket-sized chapel that recreates the sanctuaries of former haciendas, and the other a luxurious bathhouse.

 

The doors, windows and other architectural elements used on the façades and in the interiors of these buildings are predominantly examples from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries saved from destruction, representing the best collection created in the Canary Islands in recent years. This reflects a very common practice in Canarian architecture: the reuse of wood, ashlars and stones from demolished buildings for use in new-builds. A further example of a sustainable architecture that recognises the value of scarce and, therefore, treasured natural resources.

 

In fact, the Hotel Hacienda de Abajo boasts the best collection of tapestries in the Canary Islands, with French and Flemish pieces from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; a valuable art gallery with works from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries; Chinese sculptures, furniture and porcelain from the Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty; European furniture from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; delicate religious carvings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; and a whole host of other luxury objects. All this makes the property a benchmark on the Canarian art scene, where every corner is a delightful surprise for any art lover and evokes a bygone era in which the inhabitants of this hacienda would surround themselves with the most exquisite pieces of art from Europe, America and Asia, thanks to trade dealings around the world.