Francisco works in various fields of traditional architecture. Although he was first trained back in 1968 in Germany as an apprentice in the car industry, on his return to Spain he chose to devote himself to carpentry.

He also learnt the mason’s trade in order to… rebuild some ruins as his house and workshop in Cortes de la Frontera in the Serranía de Ronda hills, where he bought an old water-powered carpentry shop and some tile kilns. In this out-of-the-ordinary context he set about building his own home with materials from the environs – stone and mud. In Ferreirola, in the Alpujarra mountains of Granada province, he bought and restored another building in 1980-85. Later, in Benaoján (Serranía de Ronda), he did the same with a flour mill, and after that he rebuilt the ruins of another house in Tenerife.

As a carpenter he has studied numerous models of woodwork, balustrades and other traditional architectural features in both the Canary Islands and the Alpujarra, helping him to design others for use in his projects. He works with traditional techniques, using machinery only for cutting and planing. In the making of footings, for example, the outline can be cut with a band saw, whereas the profiling is done with rasps.

He has also devised his own systems, such as for hanging wooden balconies from concrete or other floors, or for joining balusters to pillars or walls, or for wooden shafts, in which as well as a tenon he inserts a mounting so that the fluctuations in humidity characteristic of northern Tenerife and the resulting changes in volume cause no warping.

In the Alpujarra he uses chestnut wood. In the Canaries, Canary Island pine is traditionally used. This wood has hardly any grain as it is largely an amalgam of resins, making it durable and allowing many old balconies in the north of the island to have survived until today. But such pinewood is hard to procure and can be used only as a costly demolition product.