Page 272 - Perú indígena y virreinal

and “the buildings are covered in straw matting and mud”. The excellent qualities and merits of the city were proclaimed by both the city’s inhabitants and by travellers. “Lima quien no te ve no te estima” (“Lima: unvalued only by those who have never set eyes on you”) is a much repeated expression, as is the reference to its climate of “eternal and everlasting spring”. The construction of its innumerable churches and monasteries—this was a typical convent city—was lauded in verses such as those of Antonio Oviedo y Herrera, the Count of La Granja, who in the 17th Century praised the opulence and eminence of the magnificent Baroque churches, on which “each dome is a brief sphere / Where the sun’s ecliptic is eternal / bathing the white relief in flame / And in these mouldings resplendence is contained: / A hydropic beacon where its rays are quenched”.
The most significant eulogies and most enthusiastic panegyrics regarding the city of Lima have been brought together by Raúl Porras Barrenechea, in his republished book entitled Antología de Lima. El Río, el Puente y la Alhamenda. In the 19th Century, the City of the Kings achieved international fame through the literary work of the Frenchman Prosper Mérimée, who related the love story between the Viceroy Amat and the famous singer from Lima, La Périchole, in his work entitled Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement (Paris, 1830). Within Peru itself and within Hispanic literature, Tradiciones Peruanas (“Peruvian Traditions”) by Ricardo Palma, published during the second half of the 19th Century, fuelled the legend of Creole Peru, a kind of blissful and problem-free Arcadia. A certain obliviousness to the tensions that existed between masters and servants, to latent racial miseries and conflicts, to the vicissitudes of a regimented colonial society, led to the creation of a certain soporific mythology surrounding the city, as reflected in the essay Lima la horrible (“Lima the Horrible”) (Mexico, 1964) by Sebastián Salazar Bondy.
As far as the urban morphology of Spanish cities in the Americas is concerned, the founding of Lima represented the culmination of a process by which the orthogonal chessboard layout was standardized. The city of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola (La Isla española), with its streets laid out in straight lines in 1497, cut perpendicularly into still- imperfect grids until the design of Lima in 1585, marked the beginning of a long process that included the founding of Santa María del Darien and Panama, and culminated with the founding of new settlements of regular design such as the Spanish city of Puebla de los Ángeles in Mexico in 1531. Seven years prior to this, in 1524, the city of Santiago de los Caballeros de León, today known as León Viejo, was founded in Nicaragua, already featuring a perfect chessboard layout, as I was able to confirm in the excavations I personally carried out in 1968. In relation to Lima, it is interesting to observe that it was this city of León Viejo, founded by Pedrarias Dávila, that served as the starting-point for all the expeditions to discover and conquer Peru and that the architect, Juan Meco, who built the New Royal Foundry of León Viejo in 1532, five year later, in 1537, became the “first architect” of the City Council of Lima. Was it he, who by virtue of his position would have been responsible for ensuring that the City of the Kings was built in accordance with the corresponding plans and ordinances, was the original author of the city’s layout? Pizarro probably did little more than choosing the site for Lima and presiding over the city’s founding ceremony. The design of the city’s streets and square would undoubtedly have been entrusted to this architect and surveyor. The similarities that exist between the perfect grid laid out in León Viejo, with its one hundred and eleven blocks and that of Lima, featuring one hundred and sixteen blocks, along with the similar layout of the buildings in the two cities, seem to confirm this fact. In support of our thesis, we might also cite from the volume Arte del Peru Colonial (“Peruvian Colonial Art”) (Mexico, 1958, 39) in which Felipe Cossío del Pomar states the following: “After the architects had debated whether narrow streets and high houses were better or whether they should be wide, spacious, long and straight, and after discussing the sites for churches, squares and other aspects required for a well ordered city, Juan Meco was appointed as the first architect of the city council in 1537, being skilled and qualified for this task. Meco assumed this post with the mission of showing plots to new settlers. One of the first carpenters to reach the capital, Juan de Escalante, worked under his orders”.
The chessboard layout of Lima established the model of city that would be extensively used throughout the whole of the Spanish Americas. In spite of its influence, Lima could be distinguished from other orthogonal cities due to a series of special characteristics. Located alongside the River Rimao, it grew in only one direction. The eccentric layout of the Plaza
Mayor or Plaza de Armas, located close to a block alongside the river, gave the centre or heart of the city a picturesque air. The construction, at the beginning of the 17th Century, of the stone bridge that linked the city to the suburb of San Lázaro and the Alameda de los Descalzos meant that, by the 18th Century, with the urban works carried out by Viceroy Amat, such as the bullring known as the Plaza de Toros del Acho and the Plaza de la Nabona or the Paseo de Aguas, the city now offered some extensive recreation areas for the inhabitants of the “quadrant”. For its part, the growth of the city was determined by the development of its blocks, that, instead of expanding ad infinitum as Latin American cities tend to do, were limited by the construction of the city walls made of sun-dried clay bricks and stone that were raised between 1684 and 1687 upon the orders of the Viceroy Duke de la Palata, in anticipation of possible attacks by foreign pirates. Measuring between five and six metres in height, these walls were pulled down in the 19th Century. The allotments and gardens that stretched along the edges of the city walls introduced a certain sense of disorder and irregularity into the city’s design, as we can observe in the Plan of Lima that the Mercedarian father Fray Pedro Nolasco engraved in 1685. Alongside the drawing in cavalier—almost vertical—perspective, by Francisco Percolasco, also dating from 1685, this image of a well- defended walled city helped to lend a symbolic value to the City of the Kings, the capital of the Kingdom of Peru. Trujillo is another walled city, in which a large part of the wall has been preserved. The plan of this city that can be found at the Archive of the Indies in Seville, dated 1687 and produced by José Formento, is extremely well known, especially through the subsequent version produced by Bishop Martínez Compañón. This city, founded by Almagro in 1534 in the Valley of the River Moche, close to the pre-Columbian centre of Chan Chan, the capital of the Kingdom of Chimu and the largest clay-brick city in the world—is located along a fertile stretch of the northern coast of Peru. The walled enclosure, that used Lima as its model, rings the city within an oval, which means that we can find both trapezoidal and triangular blocks, exceptional features in Latin American city planning. A masterful example of a Vauban-style fortress is provided by the Castle of El Real Felipe del Callao, a construction raised to defend the bay. Based on a pentagonal design, featuring a square courtyard and two raised buttresses, it was designed in 1747 by Louis Godin, with modifications by José Amich, and completed in 1763.
“Peru is a road”, as Gerbi claims in his study of the native transport routes and roads in colonial society between the 16th and 18th Centuries. When the Spanish conquered inland Peru they were amazed to discover the roads that the Incas had built throughout their entire empire, not to mention the tambos or supply posts and rest-points for the mail that rapidly carried news from Cusco to all parts of the empire, however far they may be from the capital itself. Pizarro’s armies took advantage of these routes in order to advance inland and appreciated the enormous effort that their construction had entailed. During the colonial period, once the Road Ordinances had been established by Vaca de Castro in 1543, these communication links acquired increasing importance from the moment the Spanish started to exploit the silver mines of Potosí and the mercury mines of Huanquelevica. The traffic of merchandise and mail between the Coast, the Sierra and the Altiplano, with its prolongation towards Río de la Plata in Argentina, forced the Spanish to maintain the roads, build bridges and undertake other engineering works. At the same time, these routes were the reason behind the founding and development of the towns that linked Lima with the Altiplano and Buenos Aires, on the one hand, and the Andes, on the other. The founding, in 1539, of Huamanga, today known as Ayacucho, was the result of a need for a stop-over city half-way between Lima and Cusco. Tucumán in Argentina was founded for the same reason between Buenos Aires and Arequipa, in 1540, on the banks of the River Chili and at the foot of the Volcano Mitsi in order to link the Southern Coast with the mining region of Puno and Lake Titicaca. This road infrastructure was one of the most important enterprises undertaken by the colony. For this reason it should not surprise us that one of the most important literary works of 18th Century Latin America should have been El Lazarillo de Ciegos Caminantes (“El Lazarillo: A Guide for Inexperienced Travellers between Buenos Aires and Lima”), by Concolorcorvo, that was published in 1773 at the false and imaginary “Press of La Rovada”, allegedly located in Gijón. The author of this publication, Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, who was appointed “Commissioner for the Repair of the Mail and Post-Stations” in 1771, not only delights us with his observations regarding Peruvian life but also provides a detailed
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