Page 308 - Perú indígena y virreinal

technique of marble-effect painting, used on the columns of the Nazarenes and the tower at Santo Domingo, and later, in the gateway arches to Maravillas and Callao.
Other parts of the city reflect his tastes: the Quinta del Rincon at 225 Huamalies Street in the upper part of the Barrios Altos with its garden, arbour, dining room, little theatre and murals, maybe related to the murals and water displays that adorned the house of Captain Joaquin Manuel de Azcona (now the Murillo Park in Breña), or the Quinta and Molino de Presa on the other side of the Rimac, built by his friend Pedro Carrillo de Alboroz, who used the same water from Piedra Lisa that ran through Amat’s Water Walk and also irrigated this part of the valley.
During the rule of the Viceroy Teodoro de Croix (1784–1790), the territory was reorganised into Governorships, Divisions and Subdelegations. The city was similarly restructured into major and minor quarters, necessitating the drawing up of meticulous plans with the naming of Lima as a Captaincy of Police. In the Acho area, the market garden having been paved over, the new barrio of San Lorenzo established itself.
The Superintendents had begun to wrest some of the power over the city away from the Viceroy. Croix himself, in his Memoirs, recalls that in 1786 “His Majesty approved the determinations that Jorge de Escobedo proposed for the cleaning of the streets, lighting and other Police business, ordering that the Viceroys upheld them using all their authority.”
The moral zeal of Gil de Taboada (1790–1796) was responsible for enclosing the atriums and improving the city’s lighting. He also carried out a census, finished the Lurigancho Road and the Avenue alongside the river, pushed on with improvements to the sewer system, introduced an alternative means of water supply through city wells and created a fire brigade.
In 1794, Joseph Vazquez etched a Topographical Plan of the Terrain between Lima and Callao and a Profile of a Sluice Gate. His Projected Canal, planned out in a straight line, and with six locks to cope with the changes in elevation, was intended to move good between Lima and the port on a cut leading from the river.
Roads and canals were planned to easy trade and facilitate the establishment of new settlements, such as the road built under Ambrosio O’Higgins through the valley of Santiago to the city of Valparaiso instead of along the coast. As the Viceroy of Peru, from 1796 to 1800, he asked that all future roads be “wide, straight and smooth” in his “Study on How to Encourage Agriculture and Industry in the Divisions of the Governorship of Tarma and Ease the Construction of its Roads”, dated the19th of July, 1796. O’Higgins was also responsible for alerting the authorities to the “disgraceful mistreatment of the Yndians”—something he had witnessed whilst carrying out these duties.
In Lima he managed to convince the powerful Tribunal of the Consulate of the benefits there would be in a road of this sort to Callao, arguing that it would generate trade
(of which, the members of the Consulate were in charge). He managed to get their backing for his plan, without recourse to the public purse, the whole project being overseen by Antonio Elizade, Commissioner of the Tribunal.
His succinctly entitled “Plan for the Two New and Old Roads from Lima to Callao, the First Being Constructed Under the Orders of His Excellency the Viceroy Marquis de Osorno in the year 1800” gave credit to “A.Baleato fecit”, “Marcello Cabello inculpsit. Limae anno Domini MDCCCI”: it was one of the most efficient achievements of the age of enlightenment (the road followed a similar path to that laid out for the planned canal). O’Higgins was eulogised in Hipolito Unanue’s Discourse published in Lima in 1801, shortly after his death.
The plan shows the terrain between Lima and Callao and the path the new road was to take, as well as that followed by the tortuous, winding old road. It also outlined huacas—pre-Hispanic ruins, haciendas, canals, lagoons, the recently built pentagonal settlement of Bellavista and the Royal Felipe Fort. Lower down we can find the new gateway portico, two circular rest areas and a cross-section of the road.
Traffic was to be separated; the raised central part being reserved for horses and carriages in order to lessen the impact upon the packed sand on pebble surface. The road was flanked by four lines of trees, with canals and elegant walls creating pedestrian areas on both sides, two in Lima and one in the port, completed with five circular ovals with “stands or circular lines of seats” for the public and “fencing in order that horses might not enter the walkways.”
“Two lions upon pedestals” (as in Proposal A for the Water Walk) presided over the entrance to Lima and the “Plaza de la Reina”, or Queen’s Square, facing the Portico, conceived as a triumphal neo-classicist archway with three smaller arches upon differing bases with eight Ionic columns forming three separate pediments crowned with the coats of arms of Carlos IV, Viceroy O’Higgins, who had been named Marquis of Osorno, and the Tribunal of the Consulate respectively. In spite of the fact that O’Higgins was credited with having designed the archway, that honour went to the architect Luis Rico, Colonel of the Royal Engineers.
The destruction of this gateway began in the period leading up to independence; the English sailor Gilbert F. Mathison recorded on the 30th of March, 1822 that “a splendid avenue of trees leads one to the Peruvian metropolis at whose entrance stands an arch, where the smashed insignia of the Spanish crown is redolent of the now weak and dismembered state of the Spanish Empire”. All that remains now is its trajectory, corresponding to the modern Avenida Colonial, which leads to the Plaza Dos de Mayo, where previously the archway and the Plaza de la Reina had once stood.
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