Catedral de Santa Ana
Catedral de Santa Ana in Las Palmas is a Catholic cathedral whose story is written in layers: work begun in the early 1500s, finished in 1570, and then reshaped again in the 18th century until its interior and its exterior tell partly different architectural languages.
A church shaped by successive bishops
The present church’s construction began in 1500, during the episcopate of Fr. Diego de Muros, who died in 1524. He was the third Bishop of Las Palmas and also Dean of Santiago. The initial architect named for this first phase is Don Diego Montaude, credited with the design; he was later succeeded by Juan de Palacio. What matters here is not just who started the job, but when the cathedral first came alive as a functioning place of worship. The structure was finished, and the first offices were celebrated on the eve of Corpus Christi, 1570, under the fourteenth Bishop, Fr. Juan de Alzolares. That completion date is the turning point in the cathedral’s wider importance. The cathedral became the Roman Catholic Diocese of Canarias’s principal church—meaning it wasn’t a local monument in isolation. For the whole archipelago, it remained the only cathedral in the Canary Islands until 1819, when the Diocese of San Cristóbal de La Laguna was founded, with jurisdiction for the islands of the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
