The solution proposed in 1907 is surprising when viewed from the Arrecife of today, because to speed up those works, it was planned to lay rails through the city streets themselves, install a small industrial railway infrastructure, and use locomotives and wagons to transport materials. It was not a railway intended for passengers nor an urban tram, but a system conceived exclusively to facilitate the construction of the port, although its route would require the tracks to cross some of the busiest areas of that small capital.
On September 28, 1907, Ruperto González Hernández, manager of the Sociedad Anónima de Construcción del Puerto del Arrecife, submitted a request to the City Council to install these railway tracks intended for the transport of materials necessary for the works, a document especially significant because it allows us to know not only the existence of the project, but also the routes that were intended to be used and the way in which the new infrastructure was to be integrated into the urban fabric of Arrecife.
The story, therefore, did not begin with a locomotive entering the city, but with an administrative request that announced a much deeper transformation. Arrecife was about to coexist with an infrastructure that, although provisional and linked to the port works, would introduce a completely new image to its streets for years.
Two lines crossing the city
The first itinerary started from the area known as Cuatro Esquinas, where one of the quarries used by the company was located, and advanced along the then Calle Real, the current León y Castillo, until reaching the sea, so that the extracted stone could be directly transported to the works of the future pier.
The second route responded to a different need, as it was mainly intended for the transport of sand. It started from the area of Callejón del Puente and crossed Calle Quiroga, Plaza de la Constitución, and Calle del Campo, then continued in the direction of Reducto beach, from where part of the necessary construction material would be obtained.
The image is difficult to imagine today, because those streets that currently form part of the consolidated urban landscape of Arrecife were destined to become a shared space between pedestrians, carts, animals, wagons, and a small locomotive, all in a city that still retained a very small scale and whose urban structure was far from resembling what we know today.
A port that took years to build
The request of September 1907 also did not arise out of nowhere, as the project for the new port had been gestating for years and responded to a fundamental aspiration for the economic future of Arrecife. In 1901, the project for the construction of a Port of General Interest in the capital and water supply had been approved, with a budget of over 1.1 million pesetas, while in 1906 the breakwater and service road were put out to tender for 927,191.64 pesetas, with an initially planned period of six years.
In that context, on May 12, 1906, the Sociedad Anónima de Construcción del Puerto de Arrecife was incorporated, a company that was founded with 200 shares of 1,000 pesetas each and brought together prominent members of the local bourgeoisie, while Andrés Barral Sarabia took over the technical direction of works that would require considerable logistical organization for the time.
Among those linked to that project was precisely Ruperto González Hernández, who would later be mayor of Arrecife between 1909 and 1911 and who had already served as a councilor in 1907 and 1908, a circumstance that adds a political and business dimension to that request which, apparently, could have seemed solely a technical matter.
The City Council had to decide whether to let the train pass
The document submitted on September 28 opened a municipal file and forced the City Council to study how an infrastructure of these characteristics could occupy the streets without completely altering the daily life of the city.
The decision was not immediate. The project was submitted for public information for twenty days and, after that period, no claims were filed, while the research published in the XIV Conference on Studies on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote even reports that the neighborhood showed its support for the initiative.
It is important here to establish a historical precision, because September 28, 1907, was not the day of the definitive authorization of the tracks, but rather the day of the presentation of the application. The municipal agreement occurred later, on October 28, 1907, once the public information period had been completed and the necessary conditions to permit the installation had been examined.
The permit, moreover, was not an authorization without limits. The City Council established that the concession would have a duration of six years, with the possibility of extension if the State also extended the deadline for the execution of the works, and determined that the streets occupied by the tracks must subsequently be left in perfect condition, while the rails would have to be placed in the center of the streets and at pavement level, leaving the corresponding space conditioned by paving stones or cobblestones.
The conditions allow us to imagine quite well the municipal concern for an infrastructure that was going to share the street with citizens. If steam engines were used, they had to be operated by competent personnel, their passage had to be announced by whistle or bell, and a person had to accompany the circulation to regulate the movement and warn pedestrians, while the responsibility for possible accidents would fall on the company.
The City Council even reserved the possibility of seizing the tracks if the company failed to comply with the established conditions, so that that small industrial railway was born subject to a regulation that may seem curious today, but which perfectly reveals the difficulties of introducing a locomotive into a city where there was no experience whatsoever of coexistence with this type of machinery.
The locomotive arrived in 1908
The municipal authorization was only the beginning, because then came the time to turn the project on paper into a real infrastructure. The company acquired quarries, tracks, wagons, and a locomotive, and the documentation preserved by Memoria de Lanzarote identifies one of these machines as acquired in 1908, intended to transport stone from the quarry located in the Cuatro Esquinas area to the works of the new pier.
The existence of that locomotive does not belong solely to the realm of written documentation, because historical images are also preserved that allow it to be contemplated and, above all, photographs in which the rails installed in Calle Real, the current León y Castillo, appear.
One of those photographs, belonging to the Andueza Martín family collection and dated between 1911 and 1920, precisely shows the street with the railway tracks, constituting one of the most important visual proofs for reconstructing that history.
The locomotive, therefore, is not a later reconstruction or an interpretation based exclusively on administrative documents. The rails were really on the streets of Arrecife and a small locomotive ran on them to transport the materials with which the port was being built.
The city had to adapt to the train
The project also was not definitively fixed in the initial layout, because the characteristics of some streets made it necessary to study modifications. In 1908 the company requested to alter one of the routes due to the narrowness of Calle Quiroga at its intersection with León y Castillo, considering then using the Muelle alley and continuing along Calle Coll, although that alternative was rejected due to the intense traffic that space supported.
Subsequently, another route was authorized that passed near the Castillo de San Gabriel, continued along Calle Coll, La Esperanza, and Calle del Ángel, and finally reached the coastal area and El Reducto, demonstrating that the railway not only required the installation of rails but also began to temporarily modify the organization of urban space itself.
At some points, it was necessary to negotiate with private owners to facilitate the passage of the tracks and, in one of the documented cases, even the demolition of a room was considered to widen a street and allow the passage of the wagons, with the commitment to rebuild it once the works were finished.
That meant that the construction of the port was physically modifying Arrecife, because the needs of an infrastructure designed to transform the city's economy were reaching its own streets and even affecting private properties.
A locomotive that ended up causing complaints
The coexistence between the city and that machinery was not always easy either. In 1913, several residents complained about the circulation of the locomotive and the safety conditions, which led the City Council to recall the obligations established in the 1907 authorization.
The situation reached such a point that, at the beginning of 1914, the circulation of the machine was temporarily prohibited until the company complied with the municipal provisions, although the deficiencies were later corrected and the service could be resumed.
The memory of that locomotive also became linked to the memories of those who lived through those years. Marcelino de Páiz later recalled the machine circulating through Calle Real and children playing with small metal pieces they found on the rails, a testimony that allows us to understand that this infrastructure, although conceived as a strictly industrial resource, ended up becoming part of the city's daily life.
It was not just a public work that could be seen from afar. It was a locomotive crossing Arrecife, with its sounds, its wagons, and its risks, while the population continued to go about their lives around the works.
The great work took its time
The port was supposed to be finished in six years, but reality was very different. Storms and the constant emigration of workers to America delayed the work, so that in 1913 the company had to request an eighteen-month extension, while later World War I caused new difficulties and increased the cost of materials, forcing another extension to be requested in 1916.
The construction ended up lasting more than a decade and the Muelle Grande project was completed in February 1919, although there were still works related to the paving of some streets through which the tracks had run and the cleaning of certain areas near the port.
The official inauguration of the Muelle Grande took place in 1920, and with the completion of that great work, the end of the small railway infrastructure that had allowed the transport of its materials also began.
In 1919 a commission studied the removal of the tracks installed in different streets and how to return the roadways to their previous appearance, while in 1920 part of the infrastructure and the locomotive were sold, thus closing a unique chapter in the urban history of Arrecife.
The rails that disappeared from memory
History ended up leaving a paradox, because the infrastructure that had been necessary to build the Muelle Grande practically disappeared from the urban landscape as soon as it was no longer needed. The streets progressively recovered their usual appearance, the rails were dismantled, the locomotive stopped running, and the wagons disappeared from Calle Real, Quiroga, and the other routes used during the works.
For approximately a decade, however, Arrecife had a small industrial train circulating through its streets, an image that today seems difficult to reconcile with the contemporary urban landscape, but which the preserved photographs and documents allow us to reconstruct with considerable precision.
Walking today along León y Castillo, Quiroga, or the vicinity of the old seafront makes it difficult to imagine that scene, although the images preserved by Memoria de Lanzarote allow us to bring it back to the city for a few moments, showing the rails installed in Calle Real and the small locomotive used to transport stone to the port works.
The day another Arrecife began to be laid
On September 28, 1907, a train did not arrive in Arrecife, nor was a railway inaugurated. Something more discreet happened that day, but over time much more significant: a company linked to the construction of the new port requested permission to occupy the city's streets with rails, because it needed a quick and efficient way to transport the materials with which it was going to build the infrastructure that would end up transforming Arrecife's relationship with the sea.
That request was the first administrative step for an infrastructure that would later require regulating the traffic of a locomotive, warning pedestrians with bells and whistles, negotiating with private owners, modifying routes, and finally, removing the rails to return the streets to the city.
For a few years, Arrecife had something that today seems impossible to imagine, a train crossing its center not to carry passengers, but to build the port that would change its history.
And perhaps that is the true story hidden behind that date, because before becoming the port city we know, Arrecife had to learn to live with a small locomotive that brought the port to its own streets.
Documentary sources
• Antonio J. Montelongo Fránquiz and Marcial A. Falero Lemes, El Puerto del Arrecife, Cabildo de Lanzarote and Ayuntamiento de Arrecife, 2000, p. 109.
• Antonia Sáenz Melero, Manuel García González and Francisca M.ª Perera Betancort, "La Compañía Anónima de Construcción del Puerto de Arrecife. El Muelle Grande", XIV Jornadas de Estudios sobre Fuerteventura y Lanzarote, pp. 351-374.
• Arrecife Municipal Archive, file for authorization of railway tracks and Book of Minutes of Sessions of the Arrecife City Council, October 28, 1907, cited in the research of the XIV Jornadas.
• Memoria de Lanzarote, documentation and historical images of the locomotive and the rails of Calle Real.
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