1993: when Facundo Fierro brought color back to Santa Cruz de La Palma

On November 6, 1993, six houses with iconic balconies in the historic center of Santa Cruz de La Palma woke up painted in color. The intervention, promoted by Facundo Fierro together with the collective El Taller and with the participation of workers from the construction company Miguel Hernández Ventura, was initially conceived as something ephemeral: a one-day action.

It did not stop there. The neighborhood's acceptance and the public repercussions turned what was intended to be a one-time gesture into a permanent intervention, and set the precedent for what would later become a broader chromatic recovery project in the city.

Fierro defended the intervention with a documentary argument, not just an aesthetic one: the city had not been uniformly white. He relied on the chronicle of the 16th-century Italian engineer Leonardo Torriani to maintain that Santa Cruz de La Palma had a history of color on its facades that had been lost, and that his work did not invent anything, but rather recovered it.

The action was not unanimously well received—there were also critical voices advocating for white—but it ended up becoming established: a festive day was organized with music and an art market, and the project led to a color palette guide published for the city's fifth centenary. The repercussions reached beyond the Canary Islands: the experience traveled as an exhibition to the mainland and America, and Fierro was appointed curator of a related exhibition in Old Havana, inaugurated by Fidel Castro.

This intervention is the direct predecessor to other chromatic studies by Fierro on Canarian popular architecture, such as the one he would later carry out in Arucas.

Source: Diario de Avisos, "Cuando Santa Cruz perdió el miedo al color" (2017). More on the artist's career in his biography.