Casa de los Balcones

Calle San Francisco is home to La Orotava’s highest concentration of 17th-century architectural gems. Arguably the best of the traditional balconied mansions here is the justifiably popular Casa de los Balcones, dating to 1632, with its balconies arranged around a picturesque central courtyard as well as decorating the front of the building. Undoubtedly the most famous and remarkable building in La Orotava. The mansion is built in the traditional colonial architectural style, but the expert will also find Moorish and Baroque influences. Famous for its wooden balconies, which have preserved details from the time the house was built. Despite what is stated in many guidebooks, the material of the balconies is not teak, but mostly the local Canary pine, but the carefully selected varieties of this wood, which are called Riga, which is by the way the capital of the Republic of Latvia, by joinery wood traders. Riga wood is pine wood grown in extremely stunted conditions, grown slowly, which has an extremely small proportion of sapwood and which, even when dry, has a specific weight up to three times higher than ordinary wood and is extremely resistant to, among other things, ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which is much more destructive to the wooden parts of buildings in the Canary Islands than rain. In the courtyard, or patio, you will find a tourist trap with extremely lush vegetation and thus pleasantly cool, and on the second floor a museum introducing the standard of living of the local nobles. If you decide to sacrifice these few euros and take a look, it is a good comparison to remember that even three hundred years later, illiteracy was prevalent among the peasants of Tenerife, the huts and caves had dirt floors and the toilet was outside.