Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Before the conquest the area belonged to Anaga, the easternmost of the nine Guanche kingdoms of Tenerife, and the Guanches called it Añaza; the area has yielded remains such as the Mummy of San Andrés. On 3 May 1494 Castilian troops under Alonso Fernández de Lugo landed on the beach here and set up the military camp from which they conquered the island, planting a large wooden cross that gave the city its name. The island's capital was placed inland at La Laguna, and Santa Cruz long remained its fishing village and port.

It grew in importance after a volcanic eruption destroyed the rival port of Garachico in the 18th century, and in the first half of that century it was the leading corsair base of Macaronesia. Its position on the route to the Americas brought attacks: in the 1650s Robert Blake destroyed a Spanish silver fleet in the bay, John Jennings failed in 1706, and on 25 July 1797 Horatio Nelson's assault was beaten off and he lost his right arm. Santa Cruz broke away from La Laguna and, from 1833 to 1927, was the sole capital of the Canary Islands; since 1927 it has shared that status with Las Palmas.

A cholera outbreak in 1893 killed 382 people. In 1936, at the start of the Civil War, the Republican mayor José Carlos Schwartz was arrested and murdered. The 1980s and 1990s brought a boom and a district of towers to the south; in 2002 a flash flood killed eight people, and in 2018 the closure of the oil refinery was announced, opening land for the city to grow.

Carnival defines the city. Each February or early March thousands of people fill the streets in costume, with more than a hundred official groups — murgas, comparsas, rondallas and other musical groups — and the election of a carnival queen. Comparsas are recorded here as early as 1778, the first murga performed in 1954, during the years of a government ban, and in 1980 the festival was declared a Fiesta of International Tourist Interest. In 1987 a Celia Cruz concert drew about 250,000 people into one square and entered the Guinness Book of Records; in 2019 more than 400,000 danced to Juan Luis Guerra. It all ends on Ash Wednesday with the burial of the sardine.

The rest of the year is quieter than in La Laguna, the student town up the hill, but the city has a strong cultural life. The Auditorio hosts the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra and festivals of opera, jazz and dance; the Teatro Guimerá, built in 1849, is the oldest theatre in the islands; and the Ramblas and García Sanabria park hold an open-air sculpture collection with works by Henry Moore, Joan Miró and Óscar Domínguez. Freemasonry left a mark on the city's buildings and even its plan, from the Añaza Lodge founded in 1895 to the neo-Egyptian temple. Football follows CD Tenerife at the Heliodoro Rodríguez López stadium, and the city's people take pride in the name chicharreros.

About 211,000 people lived in the municipality in 2024, and the city runs without a break into La Laguna, forming an urban area of more than 380,000 — nearly half the island's population lives in or around Santa Cruz. Most residents are of Spanish or Portuguese descent with some Guanche ancestry, with communities from Cuba and Venezuela, North and sub-Saharan Africa, long-established Sindhi Indian and Korean minorities and, more recently, Russians.

The economy runs on services: government, trade, the port — one of the busiest in Spain and a stopover for cruise ships crossing to the Caribbean — and the highest concentration of shops in the Canaries. The city shares the islands' institutions with Las Palmas, housing the Canary Parliament and half of the regional ministries, and several faculties of the University of La Laguna. More than four-fifths of the municipality is natural land, mostly in the Anaga mountains.

Homelessness is a current concern: Caritas counted more than 2,800 homeless people on the island in May 2026, and Santa Cruz has the most of any Canarian municipality. The arrival of migrants by boat in the 2020s has also brought camps to Tenerife. Daily life is outdoor and sociable, with evenings in the bars of La Noria and weekends at Las Teresitas.

Santa Cruz eats the cooking of the Canaries. Papas arrugadas, 'wrinkly potatoes', are small unskinned potatoes boiled in salt water and served with mojo — red mojo, often served with meat and called mojo picón in its spicy form, or green mojo, often served with fish. Gofio, a flour ground from roasted grain that was the islanders' staple for centuries, is stirred into fish broth with onions to make escaldón, and it turns up in desserts too. Canarian ropa vieja mixes chicken and beef with potatoes and chickpeas, and conejo en salmorejo is rabbit marinated in a sauce with coriander.

The port gave the city its nickname: chicharro was the cheap fish its people were teased for eating. Fish soup and sancocho, boiled fish with potatoes, sweet potatoes, gofio and mojo, use local species such as grouper, dentex and wreckfish. Goats supply much of the islands' meat and cheese, and queso tierno is a soft local cheese; La Recova, the municipal market, sells fruit, vegetables and flowers.

For something sweet there is bienmesabe, a paste of almonds, honey and sugar, and the barraquito, said to have appeared in Santa Cruz in the mid-20th century, is a layered coffee drink with condensed milk, frothed milk and Licor 43. The islands' Malvasía wines were exported from the 17th century, and the islands still make wines under several denominations of origin.