TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes

TEA — Tenerife Espacio de las Artes — is the contemporary art centre of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a long low building of raw concrete designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, holding the island's modern art collection, a photography centre and a free public library. It sits at the bottom of the old town, on the edge of the Barranco de Santos, ten minutes' walk from the main shopping streets and five from the port.

If galleries are not usually your thing, read the next sentence anyway. TEA is worth an hour mainly as a building: a dark concrete slab from the outside, and inside a cool, half-lit maze where daylight arrives in shafts through slots cut in the roof. Walking through it is the experience. The art is a bonus, and one of the collections — the surrealist paintings of Óscar Domínguez — is genuinely important rather than merely local.

It opened in 2008 after a long build, and it was part of a deliberate campaign by the city to stop being a ferry port people passed through. Together with Calatrava's concert hall along the seafront and the Palmetum on the reclaimed rubbish tip, it turned the capital into a place with buildings worth a detour. Santa Cruz is not a resort and never pretends to be; it is a working Spanish city, and a day spent in it feels different from a day on the south coast.

The architects and what they were solving

Herzog & de Meuron are the Basel practice behind Tate Modern in London and the Beijing "Bird's Nest" stadium. TEA was designed with the Canarian architect Virgilio Gutiérrez Herreros, and the local input shows in the way the building sits on its site.

The problem was an awkward one. The plot runs along the lip of a barranco — one of the dry ravines that cut every Canary island down to the sea — with the historic bridge of the Puente Serrador at one end and a steep drop on one side. Rather than build a box and turn its back on the ravine, the architects laid the building out as a low, angular wedge that follows the line of the gully, and cut a public pedestrian route diagonally through the middle of it. You can walk from the old town down towards the ravine straight through the building without buying a ticket. That through-route is free, always, and it is the sort of gesture that makes a public building feel public.

The light wells

The single best thing about the interior is the light. The roof is punched with a scatter of irregular skylights and vertical slots, and the concrete walls below are cut with narrow openings in what looks like a random pattern but is not. The result is a building lit almost entirely from above, in hard white shafts that move across the floor through the day and leave the corners in shadow.

It is the opposite of the flat, even, shadowless lighting most galleries use, and it means the place looks different at eleven in the morning and at five in the afternoon. Photographers work out quickly that the interior is more interesting than most of what hangs in it. On a hot afternoon there is also the simple pleasure of thick concrete: the building stays cool without feeling air-conditioned, which on this latitude is an achievement in itself.

Óscar Domínguez: the surrealist from Tacoronte

The heart of the permanent collection is the work of Óscar Domínguez, born in Tacoronte on Tenerife in 1906 and the only Canarian to become a central figure in a major European art movement. He went to Paris in the 1920s, fell in with André Breton's surrealist circle in the early 1930s, and stayed in it.

His contribution that art students still learn is decalcomania: press paint between two surfaces, pull them apart, and let the accidental blotting suggest the image. Max Ernst took it up. Domínguez also made objects — a wheelbarrow lined with red silk is the one people remember — and later paintings that drift towards Picasso. His life ended badly, by his own hand in Paris on the last day of 1957, and the collection here carries that shadow.

Tenerife mattered to the movement more than you would guess. Breton, Benjamin Péret and Jacqueline Lamba came to the island in May 1935 for an international surrealist exhibition, largely at Domínguez's urging; Breton wrote afterwards about the volcanic landscape in terms that read like a surrealist manifesto with a map attached. He is one of the names in our round-up of Canarians who made a mark elsewhere, and the connection is a reminder that the islands were not always a cultural backwater.

The photography centre

TEA absorbed the island's Centro de Fotografía Isla de Tenerife, which had been running since the early 1990s, and photography is treated here as a main course rather than a side dish. There is a dedicated exhibition programme, a photographic archive of the island running back to the nineteenth century, and a library of photography books.

The archive material is the part that catches visitors out. Old plate photographs of Santa Cruz harbour, of banana quays and coaling stations, of the streets before the towers went up, tell the story of how tourism reshaped these islands more directly than any museum caption. Temporary shows change several times a year and lean towards documentary and contemporary work, often from Africa and Latin America as much as from Europe — which, given where Tenerife actually sits, makes sense.

The free library, and the hours nobody expects

Here is the detail that locals use and visitors almost never discover. TEA houses a branch of the state public library, and it does not keep normal Spanish opening hours. It runs through the middle of the day when much of the city shuts for lunch, and it stays open into the evening and at weekends, well beyond the hours of the galleries around it.

It is free, it does not require a ticket to the exhibitions, and anyone can walk in and sit down. Students revise there. People read the papers. In a city where the midday closing can leave you with two dead hours, a cool, quiet, free room with wifi and good light is a genuinely useful thing to know about. Exact opening times have changed more than once and differ between term time and summer, so confirm them on the day rather than taking anyone's word for it — including ours.

Tickets, hours and how long to allow

TEA charges a modest entry fee for the exhibition galleries, with reductions for students, over-65s and residents, and there are regularly free access slots — traditionally on certain days or evenings. The library and the public passage through the building are free at all times. Prices and free-entry days have been revised periodically and we will not print a figure that might be wrong by the time you read this; the centre publishes its current rates on its own site.

Allow an hour for a straightforward visit, ninety minutes if there is a temporary show you care about, and half a day only if you intend to sit in the library or the café. It is closed on at least one day a week, as most Spanish museums are, and that day catches people out. There is no dedicated visitor car park; street parking in this part of the old town is metered, and the blue-line system applies.

Getting there

TEA is on Avenida de San Sebastián, at the foot of the old quarter beside the Puente Serrador. From the Plaza de España — the big square with the shallow lake, where most buses and tours arrive — it is a walk of roughly ten minutes, mostly downhill, past the Mercado de Nuestra Señora de África. The market itself is worth folding into the same trip: an African-styled 1940s building around an open courtyard, with fish, flowers, cheese and a bar in the basement that does a good coffee.

Coming from elsewhere on Tenerife, the tram from La Laguna ends a few minutes' walk away, which makes a morning in the old university town and an afternoon at TEA an easy pairing without a car; the tram runs frequently and takes well under an hour end to end. From the southern resorts the motorway bus services run to the Intercambiador interchange, five minutes' walk uphill.

What to combine it with

Santa Cruz rewards a full day rather than a dash. The natural circuit from TEA takes in the market, the old streets around Calle del Castillo, the flower-filled García Sanabria park with its outdoor sculptures, and then the seafront. The Museum of Nature and Archaeology is five minutes away and holds the Guanche mummies, which is the other essential indoor stop in the city.

End at the Auditorio and, if you have a car and an hour of daylight left, drive out to Las Teresitas, the golden beach the city built itself with sand shipped in from the Sahara. For a longer day, the road on beyond it climbs into the Anaga mountains, which is where Tenerife stops looking like a holiday island and starts looking like a rainforest.

So, is it worth it?

Yes, with a caveat. If you want a large permanent collection of famous paintings, TEA will disappoint you: it is a mid-sized centre with a strong regional focus and a programme that turns over. But as a piece of architecture it is one of the three or four most interesting buildings in the archipelago, it costs very little, and the Domínguez rooms give you a European movement seen from an unexpected angle.

Treat it as part of a day in the capital rather than a destination on its own, and it is excellent value. Anyone building a wet-weather list should note it too — it belongs alongside the caves and aquariums in our rainy-day options, and unlike most of them it costs almost nothing.