Facundo Fierro's chromatic study in Arucas

The Arucas Department of Historical Heritage, then directed by Lourdes Benítez, commissioned Facundo Fierro to conduct a chromatic study of the municipality's historic center, which was documented by the Canary Islands press in 2007.

The work replicated, in a different context, the methodology that Fierro had already applied in Santa Cruz de La Palma years earlier: scraping layer after layer of paint off the walls of historic buildings, studying the remains of the original colors, and interviewing residents to reconstruct the town's true chromatic memory. The result was a color guide available to property owners for when they repainted their facades.

The study's conclusion debunked an established idea: Arucas had not always been white. According to municipal officials, that predominant white—described in the project itself as a "dictatorship of white"—had a specific and late origin, linked to a cholera epidemic at the end of the 19th century, when whitewashing spread as a symbol of hygiene and disinfection.

The case of Arucas confirms that the 1993 intervention in Santa Cruz de La Palma was not an isolated episode, but the beginning of a line of work by Fierro on the color of traditional Canarian architecture that extended to other municipalities in the archipelago.

Source: Canarias7, "Colors end the dictatorship of white" (2007). More on the artist's career in his biography.