Wayside shrines and Cross chapels

The tasks of the Catholic Church and the one developed by the Franciscans set up in Los Realejos since 1610, undertook an extraordinary worship to the cross, a symbol of the evangelical process they were following to. The feasts go back to the first historical stage of the parish of St James the Apostle, when the Invention of the Cross-was celebrated on the 3rd of May. This fact encouraged devotion, which is present in about three hundred crosses which are located all over the municipality, without summing up the Via Crucis and the wayside shrines. These last ones have got the best samples in the parish of St James the Apostle, raised near the road and hermitage of St Benedict and the one of the parish of Our Lady of La Concepción, in the area of San Vicente; its classical shape and the space that surrounds it, designed for the representation of the sacramental autos, regarded as the best example upon this kind of constructions which are preserved in the Canaries.

But the cross chapels show that primitive devotion in Los Realejos, among them we stand out because of its dimensions and artistic resources the so – called chapel of Cruz Verde in Realejo Bajo, or the Cruz del Lomo in La Cruz Santa, without leaving out those existing chapels in other places of the town such as El Jardín, La Carrera, Tigaiga or La Cruz Santa.