DORAMAS

Santa Catalina (Spanish for Saint Catherine), Christian appropriation of the figure of Hypatia of Alexandria, could be a good start for a story. According to chroniclers in the 14th century, a chapel dedicated to her was built nearby, enjoying a strategic situation with freshwater wells. This settlement would become one of the first meeting places between Canarian and European aborigines.

At the end of the 19th century, the English transformed this potential oasis into a spa hotel surrounded by scenic gardens that practically extended from the seashore to the top of Altavista, thanks to the plants brought by Hermann Wildpret, the gardener of La Orotava back then. Wildpret’s work renewed the fruitful relationship between the Tenerife garden and the Las Palmas gardens, which previously happened through the letters between Alonso de Nava y Grimón and his friend Viera y Clavijo, or as it would happen later through life stories like those of Sventenius.

In the first half of the 20th century, new urban demands would force the fragmentation of this idyllic spot. Miguel, brother of Néstor Martín Fernández de la Torre, would manage the garden regularisation process with the collaboration of the famous landscaper Rubió i Tudurí.

Regardless of the results, Flora Pescador reminds us how the garden trees, unaware of the logic of lines and styles that appear and disappear under their tops, still keep the connection between the old and the new cities, the bottom and the top, the local and the global.

In this light, Doramas appears today as an international garden containing species not only from the Canary Islands but also Africa, America, Asia, Oceania, and Europe. We are eager to be carried away by its latent dialogue, to enjoy its presence, shadows, scents, colours, sounds and flavours. This garden is a place full of stories and interconnected memories—a place to celebrate the past and to weave a new symbiotic and lush future.