Ermita de Nuestra Señora de las Angustias

TEMPORARILY CLOSED. Checked on 14 September 2026 on the heritage page of the Icod de los Vinos town council, which replaced its opening hours with this notice, and on its Google listing, which marks it as temporarily closed. No reopening date has been published. The interior cannot be visited; the facade and the small square in front are visible from the street.

The chapel appeared in the 18th century in the oldest part of Icod and ended up giving its name to what had been calle de los Molinos. It was founded by captain Marcos de Torres, born in 1697, who came back from the Americas in 1742 with an image of the Virgen de las Angustias commissioned years earlier in Mexico. In 1747 he asked for permission to build the chapel next to his estate, so that the people living in this outlying area would not have to walk to the town centre for mass.

What most visitors remember is a stuffed baby caiman that Marcos de Torres brought from the province of Tabasco as a specimen of the animals of those lands. It hung from the ceiling until it fell, and has been kept in a glass case ever since. Local tradition turned it into the «Lizard of Angustias»: a shepherd fed a lizard milk every day and, on the day he did not, the animal turned on him; he defended himself with a spear and left the body in the chapel as a votive offering.

The facade is plain: a lintelled wooden door, a stone coat of arms with the interlaced letters M and A, a heart pierced by a sword and a royal crown. The carved stone bell gable is the work of Isidoro Gutierrez, a master mason from Garachico, and the bell came from Puebla de los Angeles. Inside there is a single rectangular nave with a flagstone floor, a Mudejar timber ceiling and a crypt in front of the altarpiece holding the founder's grave slab and that of his second wife.

The square in front, finished around 1765, has been the setting for the September celebrations in honour of the Virgin ever since, and for the librea de los diablos de las Angustias, in which a devil and a she-devil dance to the tajaraste through the streets of the neighbourhood. The chapel is also known simply as Ermita de las Angustias.