From astronomer Piazzi-Smith to Oscar Wilde's father, Konrad Adenauer, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Schmidt, Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill and The Beatles have been to the city, among many others.
I am not forgetting the Prince of Siam, who visited Puerto de la Cruz on board Kaiser Wilhelm's warship, the Victoria Luisa, on which the man who would later become King of Thailand was training to be a midshipman. This is just one of the great characters who arrived in this cosmopolitan city in the north of Tenerife. An excellent draughtsman, the then cadet painted a very interesting notebook of his visit to the port, with dragon trees and manor houses, which the then consul of Thailand, Wolfgang Kiessling, deposited in a museum in Tenerife. This copy was sent to Kiessling, owner of Loro Parque, by his friend the Princess of Thailand, a relative of the traveller and sister of the later King Bhumibol.
This city has been a destination for some very interesting characters, including three of the Beatles - John Lennon didn't come - who toasted in the Portuguese sun and put the city on the musical map of the 1960s. If we go back to the 19th century, Oscar Wilde's father, the ear, nose and throat surgeon and ophthalmologist William Wilde (1815-1876), helped local doctors to control a cholera epidemic that hit the island of Tenerife hard. He was Queen Victoria's oculist and stayed at Sitio Litre, the mansion/museum that can be visited today, owned by John Lukas.
Weeks ago, having lunch with someone I cannot remember at the moment, he assured me that he had seen Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in the British Bookshop in Puerto de la Cruz. He was telling me this without referring to the testimony of third parties. He saw her himself. Sir Anthony Eden, British Prime Minister during the Suez crisis, was also in Puerto de la Cruz. He came to the tourist town to be cured of malaria and stayed at the little hotel in the Loro Parque, which is now the residence of Wolfgang Kiessling. And let us not forget, as a guest of the same hotel, the president of Gambia, Sir Dawda Jawara, one of whose sons was born in Puerto de la Cruz, in the Bellevue clinic of the Cobiella family.
Queen Victoria's astronomer, Piazzi-Smith, stayed at Sitio Litre in the 19th century. He calculated the height of Teide with yardsticks and nailed it down; he was wrong by only a few metres. He observed the stars and planets from Las Cañadas and wrote about space, as seen from Tenerife, over the sea of clouds.
Olivia Stone, the British travel writer, journalist, wife of the great photographer John Harris Stone, was in Tenerife with her husband and wrote a beautiful book, Tenerife and its Six Satellites. It was translated and published by the Cabildo de Gran Canaria. She gave a master class on the islands in that work, describing all the beauty and poverty of the archipelago. Olivia Stone and her husband were in Puerto de la Cruz in 1885 and stayed at the Turumbull Hotel, located on the corner of what are now Calle Blanco and Calle Doctor Ingram.
The current King and Queen of Sweden, Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia, the former Queen Margrethe of Denmark, the current King and Queen Emeritus of Spain have been in the Port on several occasions - even on their honeymoon as princes - almost always staying at the Hotel Botanico.
I am not forgetting, in the 1950s, Dulce María Loynaz, later winner of the Cervantes prize, who as a young poetess, recently married to the social chronicler of the Diario de La Marina, the Tenerife-born Pablo Álvarez de Cañas, travelled several times to El Puerto, a city which inspired her to write Un verano en Tenerife, her only prose book. Dulce María gave a beautiful mantle to the Virgen de la Peña de Francia, which presides over the church of the same name, the parish church in Puerto de Tenerife.
At a tense moment with her husband, whom she later divorced, Agatha Christie came to Puerto de la Cruz. She stayed at the Taoro Hotel and was inspired by the Cologan mansion in La Paz to write The Enigmatic Mr. Quin. And it was in Puerto that the German scientist Wolfgang Köhler carried out his famous experiments with primates, studying their behaviour in the Yellow House, now almost completely demolished, while spying for his country in the First World War.
German Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Schmidt spent long periods in the city. The latter came here every year and stayed at the Tigaiga Hotel, owned by the Swiss Talg family, with whose members he became great friends.
The current kings of Sweden, Carl Gustaf and Silvia, the former queen Margarita of Denmark, the current emeritus kings of Spain on several occasions - even on their honeymoon as princes - have been in the Port, almost always staying at the Hotel Botanico. And the English Premier Sir Winston Churchill, in the company of the shipowner Aristotle Onassis, drank a whisky - or more than one - in the Lido San Telmo, now Lago de Martiánez, designed by César Manrique, whose Foundation today oversees every stone that is touched in this venue, in whose Sala Andrómeda Josephine Baker performed. Countless celebrities have visited the old fishing village, which later became an attractive tourist development centre.
Although John Lennon stayed in Torremolinos, Paul, Ringo and George were in Puerto de la Cruz. They stayed at the house of Dr. Voormann, father of Klaus Voormann, who was manager and arranger of the group, and who still returns to Puerto with his family to enjoy its climate, also at the Tigaiga hotel. The car they used for their excursions, a small Austin Healey convertible, is in the possession of the Siepper family. They treasure it.
King Leopold of Belgium visited the town and stayed at the Hotel Taoro, where General Franco had coffee on so many occasions. The great writer César González-Ruano stayed at the Miramar Hotel, owned by the eternal mayor of Puerto de la Cruz and creator of the modern tourist Puerto de la Cruz, Isidoro Luz Carpenter.
As you can see, very interesting people - there are many more, I have given just a few examples - have visited Puerto de la Cruz; famous travellers. Let us not forget Humboldt, who knelt down every time he liked something, and knelt down again at a halt on the old road from Cuesta de la Villa to La Orotava, when he saw the Valley in all its splendour. But these are other stories that we will tell another day.
