Fuente del Cuervo

La Hacienda de la Fuente del Cuervo (The Crow Spring Estate), located just one kilometre away from the town of Buenavista del Norte, on the north-western tip of the island of Tenerife, is considered one of the most historic mansions of the island.

This fantastic Tenerife mansion, was built by D. Juan Mendez "the Elder", a converted Jew, native of the town of Llerena in Extremadura (Mainland Spain) and founder of Buenavista in 1517, after the first distribution of land in the area. This was during the very first years of the sixteenth century, and the Estate pre-existed the town.

Mendez "the Elder" chose this place to establish his mansion, because of the existence of a natural spring of water which gives its name to the whole. It was the basis of the agricultural wealth of the estate, which developed as a centre of sugarcane production for export mainly to the major ports of Antwerp, Seville and Lisbon.

This two storey mansion, consists of a ground floor  designed for storage of agriculture products and tools.  While the second floor was designed from the beginning for residential use, has an L-shaped base, with an open courtyard and late-medieval elements such as double façade walls crowned by battlements, as a fortified house. In fact, a proper Tenerife manor house.

The importance of this property is underlined by the fact that it is the origin of the later inheritance of the Marquis de la Fuente.

Now however, in what in the past were large fields for the production of export crops, is located the Buenavista golf course which was designed by the unforgettable Spanish Golf Master Mr. Severiano Ballesteros, after it was purchased by the Tenerife Council in 1998 at the time for the sum of 2.25 million euros.

To complete this article, we should not fail to mention the existence in the vicinity of this mansion and as an integral part of it, a chapel, known as Our Lady of the Visitation.

This building was fully, but not carefully restored in the early twentieth century thereby losing all or most of its character as far its external appearance is concerned. Internally the building can be traced back to the mist and the myth of the very early days of the Sixteenth Century via its original wooden fabric, and back to 1541 in its current stone structure. Thankfully, its coffered wooden ceilings are still preserved.

Today, this jewel of the artistic heritage of the island of Tenerife is still waiting for its complete restoration. This is a shame, as due to its magnificent location, just at the feet of the Buenavista golf course, it could be the object of desire of any wealthy lover of historical mansions, both reducing pressure on the Spanish Tax payer and in recovering its total glory, the brightness that this beautiful Tenerife manor house deserves.