SAINT MICHAEL'S CHURCH
On September 29, 1492, the militia lieutenant, D. Alonso Fernández de Lugo, landed on the shores of Tazacorte, he chose Saint Michael's Day as the preferred saint of Isabel I. He met with the island's kings in the Valle de Aridane and said: "I Alonso Fernández de Lugo on behalf of Pope Alexander VI and their Majesties the Kings of Castile D. Fernando II and Dª Isabel I conquered this island by calling it San Miguel de La Palma."
Under the advocacy of San Miguel, the first hermitage on the island had been erected in honour of the Saint. The Villa and Port of Tazacorte was the first place where the Holy Archangel was venerated on the island. This town keeps him as patron and owner of the parish, together with Our Lady del Carmen.
“Both the hermitage of San Pedro Apóstol (Argual), that of Our Lady of Sorrows and that of Saint Michael in Tazacorte, were built by the lords of the sugar estates and sugar mills, who owned them as their own, as an intrinsic privilege to its socio-state position. All of them originally had similar characteristics, so that the oldest of the three, that of San Miguel, possibly served as a model for the later ones. This type of hermitage, with specific characteristics within the religious palm architecture, dates back to the first years of Castilian colonization and, on the one hand, combined the Mudejar Hispano-Muslim tradition with forms imported perhaps from the Netherlands. Unlike the traditional hermitages of the island, with a main door, balcony and upper bell tower on the same vertical axis, they had a main façade finished in a triangular gable, formed by the two slopes of the roof, and a small belfry for the single bell on one of the the corners. At present, only the hermitage of San Pedro preserves this original arrangement.
In 1513, when Jácome de Monteverde arrived in La Palma to manage his sugar estates, he found in the middle of his cane fields a church that dezia Sant Miguel, which in these times was very old and demolished, because it was not in vain that it had been the first that was built on this island. In order not to lose the dedication of Saint Jácome de Monteverde, he undertook the construction of another church, which he paid for from the foundations using his own slaves and oxen. The factory then carried out, apparently under the license of Bishop Don Frenando Vázquez de Arce, had already been completed on December 13, 1522.
The church was expanded in the middle of the last century, as it was insufficient for its parishioners when it rose to the category of parish, when it was disconnected from that of Nuestra Señora de los Remedias de Los Llanos de Aridane in 1920, unfortunately adding a side nave.
