Puerto de la Cruz covers only 8.7 square kilometres on the coast of the Orotava valley.⁶ For most of its history it was not a town in its own right but the harbour of La Orotava, the "Puerto de la Orotava". Two great waves of trade shaped it: first the wine of the valley, and then, from the 1880s, visitors in search of a mild winter.

The harbour of the valley

The valley of La Orotava produced more export wine than any other part of the Canaries under the old regime, and its harbour grew with the vineyards. The historian Carmelo Torres, drawing on earlier studies, shows how the port's share of the royal revenues collected in Tenerife rose from 26.2% in 1625 to 80.2% in 1681, before falling back to 54.5% in 1718. The mole of Santa Bárbara, the first attempt at an artificial harbour, was begun in the 1640s.¹ The main buyer of the valley's malmsey was England, whose convoy usually arrived in March and April to load wine and brandy. After the episode known as the derrame del vino, when wine was spilt at Garachico in 1666, English import policy changed and, with other factors, sales to England fell.¹

The wine trade had a price. Vines took over land from other crops, and Tenerife came to depend on grain from the eastern islands. Torres studied every ship that arrived at the Puerto in 1694 and 1695: of 117 arrivals from other islands and ports, the largest share came from Fuerteventura, which supplied almost 87% of the grain unloaded here.¹

The town grew within the walls of this trade. Its streets were laid out in a grid in the early seventeenth century, in the time of the councillor Antonio Franchy Lutzardo, around the quay and the square of El Charco, and the humble fishermen's quarter of La Ranilla.² In 1599 the customs officer Juan de Tejera built a hermitage to Saint John the Baptist for the "forty or fifty" households of the harbour, which then had no priest of their own; it later passed to the Franciscans. The church of Nuestra Señora de la Peña de Francia grew from a hermitage of 1603, and the seafarers had their own chapel of San Telmo.² The pentagonal Castillo de San Felipe guarded the shore, and the Casa de la Aduana, the customs house, stood on the quay.²

A town of its own

The Puerto was part of the jurisdiction of La Orotava until 1813, when it became an independent municipality.³ By then it was also a place of science. In 1788 a royal order of Charles III created the Jardín de Aclimatación, the botanical garden on the slope above the town, so that plants of commercial interest from the colonies could be acclimatised in one place; the task fell to the Marqués de Villanueva del Prado.² Alexander von Humboldt passed through in 1799 and complained that the exuberant vegetation around the town made geological work difficult.⁶

Invalids and Victorian travellers

In the second half of the nineteenth century foreign visitors began to arrive for their health, above all British people suffering from tuberculosis and other lung diseases. The historian Nicolás González Lemus has reconstructed their world. When the Irish travel writer Olivia Stone and her husband John reached the Puerto in September 1883, they stayed at the boarding house of the Scottish couple John and Elizabeth Turnbull, hired horses from Lorenzo Morisco, the town's only official guide for the ascent of Teide, and visited the botanical garden, then run by the Swiss gardener Hermann Wildpret.⁴ Their Tenerife and its Six Satellites (1887), two volumes of nearly a thousand pages, was much more than the guidebook its publisher seems to have wanted.⁴

On 11 April 1886 local landowners and British residents founded the Compañía de Hoteles y Sanatorium del Valle de La Orotava, also known as The Orotava Grand Hotel Company, with a capital of 20,000 pounds sterling. González Lemus calls it the first tourist company in the Canaries. In September 1886 it opened the Orotava Grand Hotel in a rented villa on the plain of Martiánez, for invalid guests.⁵ After quarrels among the partners, a new company was formed and built the Taoro on a lava field above the town then called Monte Miseria, designed by the French architect Adolphe Coquet. Its central block opened with a great party on 22 December 1890, and in its time it was the largest building in the Canaries.⁵

The hotel was a social success and a financial failure. Its high-season occupancy was low, the cholera epidemic of 1894 cut communications with Europe, the arrival of tuberculin changed the treatment of tuberculosis, and many visitors preferred cheaper villas and boarding houses.⁵ In 1905, amid fears in the British community that it would fall into German hands, the company leased the Taoro to a German firm led by the doctor Gotthold Pannwitz, and it became the Humboldt Kurhaus until 1911.⁵⁷ A German scientific commission of about thirty professors arrived in March 1909, and Germans and Swiss opened a small school the same year.⁷ The Casa Amarilla, on the edge of the town, became a research station for the study of primates in 1910.²

Bananas and the modern resort

German families settled for good. Jacob Ahlers from Hamburg arrived in 1900 to recover from a lung illness and stayed on as a shipping agent and fruit exporter; bananas played a central part in the German presence in the town.⁷ The Taoro burned on 9 May 1929; from 1932 it was run by Enrique Talg, born near Hamburg in 1894, who later opened the Hotel Tigaiga in 1959.⁷ Later in the century the German businessman Wolfgang Kiessling built the Hotel Botánico and Loro Parque in the town.⁷ Today Puerto de la Cruz mixes its old streets, chapels and customs house with the hotels and the Lago Martiánez lidos designed by César Manrique.²⁶