Santa Cruz de La Palma

Santa Cruz de La Palma was founded on 3 May 1493 by the conqueror Alonso Fernández de Lugo, near a cave called Tedote, now the Cueva de Carías, north of today's town. The town, first called Villa del Apurón, grew as a port on the routes to the Americas, exporting the island's sugar cane. The main church, El Salvador, is recorded from 1512.

In 1553 the French pirate François Le Clerc, known as Pata de Palo, sacked and burned the town. It was rebuilt and fortified: the Castillo de Santa Catalina was first raised in 1554–1560 and rebuilt in its present form in 1685–1692. In 1773 a lawsuit by the merchant Dionisio O'Daly, of Irish descent, and Anselmo Pérez de Brito against the town's hereditary councillors won a ruling from the Crown, and Santa Cruz held the first popular elections to a town council in Spain.

The streets these men gave their names to became the main street, called the Calle Real after King Alfonso XIII visited in 1906. A crisis in agriculture brought the largest population loss in the town's history, and around 1900 it had about 11,000 people. It has remained the island's capital. In 2021 an 85-day eruption on the Cumbre Vieja ridge, in the south of the island, destroyed more than 3,000 buildings and forced around 7,000 people from their homes.

The town's heritage is mostly Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical. Plaza de España, with the church of El Salvador, the town hall, a stone fountain and several noble houses, is considered the main example of Renaissance architecture in the Canary Islands, while the row of wooden balconies on the Avenida Marítima has become the image of the town.

Festivals define the year. Carnival culminates in Los Indianos, when the streets fill with people dressed in white period clothes and clouds of talcum powder, parodying the islanders who emigrated to the Americas and came home showing off their wealth. Holy Week, with its processions, is one of the oldest festivities on the island. Every five years the Fiestas Lustrales of the Bajada de la Virgen de las Nieves, declared of national tourist interest, bring the island's patron down from her sanctuary on a silver throne, with a parade of thousands of coloured paper lanterns lit by candles, dances of giant figures, and almost three weeks in El Salvador before she returns on 5 August. The Virgin is also the town's honorary mayor.

Sport has its own passions: the football derby between SD Tenisca and CD Mensajero is the island's biggest, and a 1983 match between them is remembered as one of the most violent in Spanish football history.

The municipality had about 15,700 people in 2025, most of them living in the town itself, which makes it the second most populous on La Palma after Los Llanos de Aridane. Together with neighbouring Breña Alta it forms an urban area of more than 30,000 people that also holds the island's airport and university hospital.

As the island capital, Santa Cruz lives on administration, commerce and the port. It is the seat of the island council, has La Palma's only major port, with ferries and cruise ships, and a busy shopping street. The old centre is made up of small districts such as La Luz, San Telmo, San Sebastián, El Puente, La Alameda and El Pilar, with residential neighbourhoods such as Las Nieves and La Dehesa in the hills above.

Life moves at an island pace. Mornings are busy with shoppers and office workers on the Calle Real, evenings bring people out to the seafront, and much of the social calendar follows the religious festivals. The 2021 eruption on the other side of the island, which cut the coastal highway and destroyed more than 3,000 buildings, left a long task of rebuilding across La Palma.

La Palma shares the cooking of the other Canary Islands. Papas arrugadas, small potatoes boiled in their skins in heavily salted water until a fine salt crust forms, are eaten with mojo, a sauce of olive oil, local peppers, garlic and paprika with cumin or coriander, red and spicy or green. Gofio, a flour made from roasted grain, is an old staple, and bienmesabe, a sweet of honey, egg yolk and ground almonds, is a common dessert.

The island's own products stand out. Palmero cheese is made from unpasteurised goat's milk, sold plain or lightly smoked in cylinders of up to 15 kilos, and protected by a designation of origin; the goats graze on wild plants all year. La Palma's wines have their own protected designation, granted in 1994, with around 600 hectares of vineyards planted in a strip along the coast at heights between 200 and 1,500 metres; Santa Cruz falls in the Hoyo de Mazo sub-zone. Bananas are grown across the island, alongside avocados, and water tunnels carry water from the highlands to the towns and farms.

In town, the restaurants and bars of the Avenida Marítima face the sea, and small tascas fill the old streets around Plaza de Borrero and the Calle Real.