Hotel Gazmira (Musa acuminata), 2026

Hotel Gazmira (Musa acuminata), 2026, Metal, acrylic paint, Overall: 234 × 119 × 35 cm

In this series of hand-painted metal sculptures, Álvaro Urbano reimagines the remains of Hotel Gazmira—an unrealized modernist project caught between aspiration and abandonment. The metal banana leaves refer directly to the organic debris that still clings to the unfinished hotel in La Palma. By turning these fragile botanical traces into lasting sculptural forms, Urbano gives shape to a history marked by ambition, interruption, and the persistence of the landscape.

Hotel Gazmira was originally conceived by architect Rubens Henríquez together with a group of banana farmers who hoped to transform the Aridane Valley into a tourist destination. Named after Francisca de Gazmira—an Indigenous woman sent by the Crown of Castile to negotiate the conquest of her own people—the project carried complex layers of colonial and economic meaning. Henríquez’s design reflected modern and neo-tropicalist influences, shaped by the Canary Islands’ close connections with Venezuela and Cuba. Yet the hotel was never completed; only the structure of the reception was built before investors withdrew, unable to foresee the later boom in banana cultivation that would have funded the project.

First presented in the solo exhibition Jardín Satélite at TEA – Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (2021), the series reflects on the shifting boundary between architecture and landscape, and on how dreams, failures, growth, and decay intertwine over time.