Seafront of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Spain, Spanish ocean architecture design, Islas Canarias photos

Seafront of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain

post updated 15 November 2025

Design: Romera y Ruiz Arquitectos

Location: Seafront of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

Seafront

Photos © Simón García | arqfoto

4 Feb 2021

Landscape of Horizons

The horizon is shown to us as the face of the earth, an outline which identifies a place and differentiates it from another. Horizon and horizontal become close but reality shows us subtle nuances that make them diverse. We look up searching for reference points. This is the moment when the horizon serves us as a guideline, giving us coordinates that gives us our position.

The experience of space is fundamentally in motion. When we walk through an unknown place, we have moved carefully as we walk, watching our step. Suddenly, we are struck by a sense of disorientation and we look for a reference, we look at the horizon and recognize the place. The castaway longs to find land, a line on the horizon to guide him. We walk hand in hand with the horizons, believing we might have not get lost.

The sea offers us a succession of different sections in its encounters with the land. The same element, water, establishes different ways of revealing itself to a matter, the earth, through its form. The shore, the line of intersection of the water with the island, offers variations to a question of descriptive geometry: a rocky coast, a suspended plane, a port, …

The silhoutte of a coast provides an unstable profile, vigilant of the tides, of the waves that change it, but like the hesitant outline of a sketch allows the definitive silhouette to be defined, that of absolute value, that which correspondes to the form given by the place, adapting itself to the topography. The new public space of the Maritime Park in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is built emphasizing the horizontality of the land, by means of a great suspended platform that transforms the place discovering a surface with unprecedented characteristics since raising by the sea a few meters, extends our horizon a great distance.

Nowadays, regattas in Gran Canaria are widely supported and have a strong tradition. In homage to this tradition, the basic geometry of lateen sailing is extracted for this project. The triangular geometry vibrates and moves to react to environmental conditions.

These factors set the principal directions for the design of the promenade and the reflective canopies; these include, among others: direct view from the new promenade to the Santa Catalina Quay and the protection of the new common areas from the dominant winds and solar movement.

The space under the canopies becomes a game of mirrors, where relationships are built between the what is real and virtual. The fact of breaking the ground and framing it under the canopy in a precise manner, reinforces this idea of virtuality, where the passer-by enters an imaginary world.

The perception of the whole is characterised by the lightness of the formal game of the canopies with their shared light entry, reinforced by the visual lightness provided by the new covering material, as well as the sloping texture of the coastal halophilic gardens, which show a changing dimension according to where you approach.

Seafront of Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, Spain – Building Information

Architects authors of the work: Romera y Ruiz Arquitectos S.L.P. (Pedro Romera García, Ángela Ruíz Martínez
Project location: Seafront of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria from the Naval Base to Phase I located in the Santa Catalina Muelle
Year of construction: 2019
Surface: 5,484 sqm (surface of intervention)

Other Participants: write relevant categories for the work:
Collaborating architects: Carlota Ardanaz Petit, Yudit Barreto Martín, Paula Cabrera Fry, Luis Guijarro Bergeron, Ester Marrero Pérez and Rosalba Santana González
Structure: Hugo A. Ventura Rodríguez
Facilities: Constantino Juan Gonzalvo Ortiz (CQ Ingienieros y Asociados)
Ingeniero Public Works: Carlos Cabrera Suárez (GEURSA)
Ingeniero Agrónomo: Marco Díaz Bertrana-Sánchez
Promoter: Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Constructor: UTE Acciona S.A. and Lopesan S.L.