The Upper Classes and Their Upper Stories Architecture and The Aftermath of The Lima Earthquake of 1746

The Upper Classes and Their Upper Stories: Architecture and
the Aftermath of the Lima Earthquake of 1746
Charles Walker
Hispanic American Historical Review, 83:1, February 2003, pp. 53-82 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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The Upper Classes and Their Upper Stories:
Architecture and the Aftermath of the Lima
Earthquake of 1746
Charles F. Walker
O n October 28, 1746, at 10:30 p.m., a massive earthquake struck Lima, the
capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, and swamped the nearby port of Callao,
shattering areas up and down the coast. One account claimed that if “the most
astute man attempted to create the perfect calamity, he could not have imag-
ined the horrors inflicted on Lima and Callao.”1 The earthquake damaged
almost all of Lima’s houses, and shook to their foundations most of the city’s
74 churches and 14 monasteries as well as the public buildings that adorned
the city’s central square, the Plaza de Armas. Estimates of the number of dead
varied from 1,200 to 6,000, out of a population of 55,000. Callao fared even
worse, as a tsunami killed almost all of its 10,000 inhabitants and leveled most
of the buildings. In an anonymous report prepared for the viceroy, the writer
observed, “of all [earthquakes] which have happened since their first Con-
quest, so far at least as hath come to our knowledge, we may with Truth affirm
that none ever broke out with such astonishing violence, or hath been attended
I would like to thank Carlos Aguirre, Arnie Bauer, Ryan Crewe, Paula Findlen, Karla Hesse,
Adrian Pearce, José Ragas, Ricardo Ramírez, Andrés Reséndez, Stuart Schwartz, Krystyna
von Henneberg, Kathryn Litherland, and the anonymous HAHR readers for their helpful
suggestions. I outlined some of the arguments developed here in “Shaking the Unstable
Empire: The Lima, Quito, and Arequipa Earthquakes, 1746, 1783, and 1797,” in Dreadful
Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Alessa Johns ( New
York: Routledge, 1999), 113 – 44.
1. Victor Montero de Aguila, Desolación de la ciudad de Lima, y dilubio del Puerto del
Callao (Lima: Imprenta Nueva, 1746), 1. I read Pablo Emilio Perez-Mallaina Bueno’s
important book on the earthquake after the completion of this article and was not able to
incorporate it. Retrato de una ciudad en crisis: La sociedad limeña ante el movimiento sismico de
1746 (Seville: EEHA-CSIC/Insituto Riva-Agüero, 2001).
Hispanic American Historical Review 83:1

Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press
54 HAHR / February / Walker
with so vast a Destruction as that which happened lately in this Capital.”2 In

his long prologue, the English translator of this official account called the cat-
astrophe “one of the most dreadful, perhaps, that ever befel this Earth since
the general Deluge.”3
The Marquis de Obando despairingly noticed that rumbles of the after-
shocks drowned out the shouts of help from people buried under debris.4
Viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco compared Lima to a battle scene: “[P]ut
to the sword and set to fire, its beautiful buildings have been turned into piles
of dirt and stones.”5 The cathedral’s two towers toppled over, destroying much
of the nave, and an arch with a statue of Philip V on the bridge over the Rimac
River tumbled into the water. Bodies, timbers, and treasure swept away by the
tidal wave washed up on Lima’s beaches for weeks afterward. Prisoners in the
Inquisition dungeon nearly drowned when a ruptured channel poured water
into their cells.6 Many people were injured during the earthquake, and in the
following months sunstroke, tertian fever, bronchitis, dysentery, and gastroin-
testinal ailments took their toll. With supply ships sunk by the tidal wave and
storage areas ruined, food was in short supply for weeks.7
Viceroy Manso de Velasco had to rebuild Lima, Callao, and the port’s mil-
itary infrastructure. Accounts of the catastrophe and its aftermath agree that his
energetic efforts imposed social control, prevented looting, assured food sup-
plies, and provided shelter — in order, ultimately, to reconstruct a safer city. As
2. True and Particular Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake which happen’d at Lima, the
Capital of Peru, and the neighboring Port of Callao, on the 28th of October . . . (London: Printed
for T. Osborne in Gray’s Inn, 1748), 32.
3. Ibid., iii.
4. “Carta que escribió el Marqués de Obando a un amigo suyo, sobre la inundación
del Callao, terremotos y estragos causados por ellos en la ciudad de Lima,” in Terremotos:
Colección de las relaciones de los más notables que ha sufrido esta capital y que la han arruinado, ed.
Manuel D. Odriozola (Lima: n.p., 1863), 47 – 69, description from 51.
5. Conde de Superunda, Relación de gobierno, Perú (1745 –1761), ed. and intro. by
Alfredo Moreno Cebrián (Madrid: CSIC, 1983), 259.
6. José Eusebio Llano y Zapata, “Relación del auto particular de fé, que el Santo
Oficio de la Inquisición de esta corte celebró en la iglesia de Nuestro Padre Santo
Domingo, el dia diez y nueve de Octubre de mil setecientos cuarenta y nueva, y breve
noticia de la ruina y estrago que padecieron la capilla y casa del Santo Tribunal, el dia
veintiocho de Octubre de mil setecientos cuarenta y seis . . .” (Lima, 1750), in Manuel de
Odriozola, Documentos literarios del Perú, vol. 7 (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1875), 385 –77.
For descriptions of the damage to churches, convents, and monasteries, see Archivo
General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 509.
7. Montero de Aguila, Desolación, 6.
The Upper Classes and Their Upper Stories 55
tribute to his success, in 1756 the Spanish crown granted him the title of
Count “Over the Waves” or Superunda. Some regarded him as Lima’s “second
founder.” The earthquake and Manso de Velasco’s ensuing reforms changed
Lima architecture. Flat roofs, quincha (wattle and daub), and adobe increas-
ingly replaced vaulted ceilings, stone arches, and higher, two-story buildings
characteristic of baroque Lima.8 The changes went far beyond replacing fallen
structures; the catastrophe gave the Bourbons the opportunity to transform
the city. In the words of Richard Morse, the rebuilding of Lima and Callao
provided the Bourbon rulers “a clean slate” to impose their vision of orderly
urban society.9
In contrast to Europe, where the tangled street pattern of medieval cities
made efforts to create straight, uniform streets particularly difficult, the eigh-
teenth-century Bourbons could build on the grid or checkerboard street lay-
out established in Lima and the rest of Spanish America at its sixteenth-cen-
tury foundation. This pattern fit Enlightenment notions of urban order, above
all the call for precisely designed streets that facilitated supervision and the cir-
culation of people, goods, and air.10 William Betagh, an Irish marine comman-
der who was in Lima in 1719, noted that the city’s streets were so straight that
one might cross the entire city “without turning a corner.”11 While planners
8. For summaries of the reconstruction and changes in architecture, see Juan Günther
Doering and Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Lima (Madrid: Ed. MAPFRE, 1992), 127 – 39;
Jorge Bernales Ballesteros, Edificación de la Iglesia Catedral de Lima (Notas para su historia)
(Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1969), 78 – 88. For an astute analysis of changing urban
policy and social codes, see Jorge Basadre, La multitud, la ciudad y el campo en la historia del
Perú (Lima: Ediciones Treintaitrés, 1980 [1929]), 74 –129.
9. Richard Morse, “Urban Development,” in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Leslie
Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 198.
10. Among many works on this topic, see Alan Durston, “Un régimen urbanístico de
la américa hispana colonial: El trazado en damero durante los siglos XVI y XVII,” Historia
(Santiago, Chile) 28 (1994): 59 –115; Anthony Vidler, “The Scenes of the Street:
Transformations in Ideal and Reality, 1750 –1871,” in On Streets, ed. Stanford Anderson
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978). When designing Guatemala City in the 1770s,
necessary due to the massive earthquake that flattened Antigua (Santiago) in 1773, planners
used the damero system but created smaller blocks (manzanas). On this process, see La
ciudad hispanoamericana: El sueño de un orden (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Históricos de
Obras Públicas y Urbanismo, 1989), 137 – 45. On the centrality of the notion of air in
urban reforms and in the Enlightenment in general, see Jean-Pierre Clement, “El
nacimiento de la higiene urbana en la américa española del siglo XVIII,” Revista de Indias
53, no. 171 (1983): 77 – 95, esp. 79 – 82.
11. Although Lima’s layout impressed this Irishman, property owners in the
9-by-13 block core emanating from the Plaza de Armas had actually subverted
sought to retain the block-by-block symmetry in the aftermath of the earth-

quake, they were more intent on creating the institutions and infrastructure
for more orderly and controllable cities. Throughout Spanish America in the
latter half of the eighteenth century, reformers did not radically alter the lay-
out of cities, but instead modified political structures, tightened legislation,
and encouraged architectural changes. Recognizing the growth of urban areas
and thus the impossibility that a single town council (the cabildo) might gov-
ern such large and disparate populations, they decentralized urban rule in the
second half of the eighteenth century. Lima was divided into four cuarteles and
40 neighborhoods. These changes responded to the growth of urban popula-
tions and changing notions of urban governance, but they also reflected the
Bourbon desire to weaken the cabildo, a relatively autonomous institution that
later became the center of many creole-led protests.12 Viceroys, visitadores, and
other authorities cleaned up the cities and fine-tuned legislation regarding
water, sanitation, festivities, architectural codes, burials, gambling, drinking,
and other aspects of urban life. They changed the penal code to address the
lower classes’ unruly behavior. These urban policies are a lesser-known yet
vital aspect of the “Bourbon Reforms.”13
Lima’s original geometric order by extending their buildings into the streets and plazas and
by dividing and subdividing their property. As maps from the period indicate, the streets
that lay outside the original core, but inside the mural walls, had far fewer right angles.
“Captain Betagh’s Observations on the Country of Peru, and its Inhabitants, During his
Captivity,” in A General Collection of the best and most Interesting Voyages and Travels in all Parts
of the World; Many of Which are now Translated into English, ed. John Pinkerton, 17 vols.
(London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row; and
Cadell and Davies, in the Strand, 1813), 14:7.
12. In Lima, Viceroy Amat y Juniet and Viceroy de la Croix oversaw these reforms,
which accelerated with the arrival of the visitador Jorge de Escobedo in the 1780s. María
Pilar Pérez Cantó, Lima en el siglo XVIII: Estudio socioeconómico (Madrid: Universidad
Autonóma de Madrid, ICA, 1985), 38 – 41; Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, “Cuarteles, barrios y
calles de Lima a fines del siglo XVIII,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 18 (1981):
97 –161.
13. Revisionist works on the Bourbon Reforms include El reformismo borbónico, ed.
Agustín Guimerá (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1996); Equipo Madrid de Estudios
Históricos, Carlos III, Madrid y la ilustración: Contradicciones de un proyecto reformista (Madrid:
Siglo XXI, 1988); and El Perú en el siglo XVIII: La era borbónica, ed. Scarlett O’Phelan
Godoy (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Instituto Riva-Agüero, 1999). For
innovative analyses of the social project of the Bourbon Reforms, see Susan Deans Smith,
“The Working Poor and the Eighteenth-Century Colonial State: Gender, Public Order,
and Work Discipline,” and Cheryl English Martin, “Public Celebrations, Popular Culture,
and Labor Discipline in Eighteenth-Century Chihuahua,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of
The count of Superunda, however, was unable to impose his and the
Bourbons’ view of urban society without opposition. Reconstruction prompted
a series of conflicts that ultimately limited or even prevented reform. The case
of eighteenth-century Lima confirms that natural disasters bring to the surface
both old and new tensions and offer vivid insights into society.14 On one hand,
fear of the lower classes shaped the viceroy’s actions. Concern about social
chaos was so great that it affected debates about moving the city and technical
decisions about the width of walls. The aftermath of the earthquake demon-
strated how strongly anxiety about the disobedience of slaves and the unruli-
ness of the plebe marked elite mentalities and even public policies. The diffi-
culties in imposing absolutism and the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America
cannot be understood without taking into account the racialized and gendered
fear and disdain of the colonial lower classes. The examination of the chaos
and controversies after the earthquake takes us directly into the streets and
courts, where these fears were aired and concomitant policies debated.
On the other hand, upper-class groups opposed the measures affecting
their property and directly fought the viceroy and his team of urban reformers.
The viceroy could not work his will in Peru. These postearthquake struggles
consequently bring to light power relations in late colonial Lima. While the
church, the viceregal state, and the upper classes often collaborated — many
members of Lima’s upper crust were clerics or held governmental positions —
they also squabbled over their respective positions in society and the strength
of the state. The viceregal state attempted to use the postearthquake rebuild-
ing to foster its absolutist project of centralizing power, rationalizing the
bureaucracy, and increasing income from taxes. The transition from a consen-
Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley, Cheryl
E. Martin, and William E. French ( Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1994), 47 –75 and
95 –114. Indispensable classic works include John Lynch, Spanish Colonial Administration,
1782 –1810 (London: Univ. of London Press, 1958); and John Fisher, Government and
Society in Colonial Peru: The Intendant System, 1784 –1814 (London: Athlone Press, 1970).
For a valuable synthesis, see D. A. Brading, “Bourbon Spain and Its American Empire,” in
Colonial Spanish America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987),
112 –162.
14. For a selection of essays on natural disasters in Latin American history, Historia y
desastres en américa latina, 2 vols., ed. Virginia García Acosta (Lima: La Red/Ciesas, 1996
and 1997). Both volumes include valuable articles on the Lima earthquake: Susana Aldana
Rivera, “¿Ocurrencias del Tiempo? Fenómenos naturales y sociedad en el Perú colonial,”
vol. 1, 167 – 94; and Anthony Oliver-Smith, “El terremoto de 1746 en Lima: El modelo
colonial, el desarrollo urbano y los peligros naturales,” vol. 2, 133 – 61.
sus to an absolutist government, however, was slow, and Viceroy Manso de

Velasco dealt gingerly with the upper classes and members of the church.15
The postearthquake debates on appropriate architecture vividly and almost lit-
erally represent the upper classes’ notion of their place in the spatial and social
hierarchy: high above the masses but somewhat distant from the intervention-
ist Bourbon state. The battle against the viceroy’s reforms demonstrated the
influence of Renaissance notions of urban grandeur and stratification in late
colonial Peru.
These tensions — apprehension about the lower classes and confronta-
tions among the colonial elite (creoles and Spaniards), the church, and the
viceregal state — remained constant in Peru until independence in the 1820s.
In fact, the postearthquake struggles preview the controversies over the Bour-
bon Reforms in Peru, which most analysts date from the ascension of Charles
III to the throne in 1759. This study shows that the Lima upper classes and
the viceregal state clashed well before the full-scale implementation of the
Bourbons’ absolutist project in the Americas.16 It also moves the analysis
towards questions of space and status, contrasting different notions of how
Lima should be rebuilt and who should live where, thus demonstrating the
importance of architecture and the use of space as a key social and cultural
marker.17 In sum, the analysis of the earthquake and its aftermath incorporates
three key elements of revisionist work on European absolutism: longer time-
frames that consider the first half of the eighteenth century before the rise of
the more renowned “enlightened despots,” a close examination of the crown
and the aristocracy that does not overlook other social groups, and the analysis
of symbolic and cultural elements alongside the better-studied institutional
components.18
15. John Lynch underlines the Bourbons’ delicate relations with the aristocracy in
Spain and in Spanish America and how this shaped Spanish absolutism. John Lynch,
Bourbon Spain, 1700 –1808 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
16. For a convincing argument on the need to examine absolutism from a longer time
frame, in this case in France, see Peter R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France,
1720 –1745 (London: Routledge, 1996).
17. A good starting point on the massive literature on the Enlightenment and
changing notions and use of space is Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, translated
by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), part 1.
18. For a summary of the development of the concepts of absolutism and the highly
questioned “enlightened despotism,” see H. M. Scott, “Introduction: The Problem of
Enlightened Despotism,” in Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later
Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. H. M. Scott (London: Macmillan, 1990), 1– 35. Agustín
Guimerá summarizes the debates in Spain, heightened around the 200th anniversary of the
The City of Kings
Founded in 1535, Lima was the capital of the Peruvian viceroyalty and the
economic and political center of Spanish South America. Most of the viceroy-
alty’s commerce moved through the city and the adjacent port of Callao, while
the viceroy, the courts, the church, and other key institutions maintained their
offices in the “City of the Kings.” Upper-class groups tended to live in the
blocks around the Plaza de Armas, while much of the Indian population lived
in El Cercado to the east. However, the noise, smells, and bustle of the Plaza
de Armas, which doubled as the central market, as well as the absence of
vacant property, pushed the colonial elite outward, and by the mid–eighteenth
century, many of Lima’s top families had residences a few blocks east of the
Plaza, near the Plaza de la Inquisición, or towards the south. The viceroy him-
self complained of the odor and noise in the Plaza, where outdoor mass was
held for more than a year after the earthquake.19 In January 1747 the cabildo
put leading property owners in charge of assuring social control and helping
with the rebuilding in two or three block areas (usually around their own resi-
dences), covering in this manner almost the entire core area south of the
Rimac River and west of El Cercado. In other words, members of the elite
resided throughout the core area. For example, don Alvaro de Bolaños over-
saw the area near La Encarnación Monastery (“behind and next to his house”),
six blocks south of the Plaza. In fact, several of the designated individuals had
“their” blocks (what would be called jirones) named after them or their family.
This was the case of Sr. Gregorio Nuñez, in charge of “su calle,” named after
his ancestor Miguel Nuñez de Miagadas at the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury.20 A single block would often have an ornate house of a distinguished
death of Carlos III in 1988 (Guimerá, Reformismo borbónico, 9 – 33). For a highly critical
view, see the essays in Equipo Madrid, Carlos III; for a balanced and lively account, see
Lynch, Bourbon Spain.
19. Archivo del Cabildo Metropolitano de Lima, Serie B, Cédulas Reales y otros
papeles, November 18, 1747. See also Archivo General de la Nación, Cabildo, 1, exp. 11.
20. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 57b– 60a. Calle Nuñez is today Jirón
Ayacucho. For the (changing) street names of Lima, I have relied on Juan Bromley, “Lima
en el año 1613,” in Evolución urbana de la ciudad de Lima, ed. Juan Bromley and José
Barbagelata (Lima: Concejo Provincial de Lima, 1945), 3 – 45; Moreno Cebrián,
“Cuarteles, barrios.” On Alvaro de Navia Bolaño y Moscoso, see Guillermo Lohmann
Villena, Los Ministros de la Audiencia de Lima (1700 –1821) (Seville: CSIC, 1974), 80 – 81;
and Mark Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, Biographical Dictionary of Audiencia Ministers in
the Americas, 1687 –1821 ( Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 233 – 34; for Gregorio
Nuñez, see Lohmann, 81– 82, and Burkholder and Chandler, 235.
member of the upper classes as well as the more simple and certainly more
21
crowded houses and rooms of the lower orders. Other Lima neighborhoods
demonstrated a great deal of racial mixing. For example, more than half of El
Cercado, a neighborhood built expressly for the indigenous population, was by
1750 non-Indian.22
The Lima aristocracy had re-created itself in the eighteenth century
through commerce, a reflection of the opportunities presented by Lima’s vir-
tual monopoly on overseas trade. Most merchants had diverse portfolios that
included both overseas and inland trade. Many immigrants arrived from Spain
in the eighteenth century, especially Basques, who often married into high
Lima society and created family networks that stretched from Europe to Lima
and into the hinterland. The acceptance of these immigrants and their inte-
gration into the already-established colonial elite tended to bridge over the
Spaniard-creole divide, which now seems not so pronounced as previously
believed.23 Leading merchants often bought governmental positions. The pur-
chase of office not only facilitated their economic and political networks but
also provided the crown with much-needed revenue. A list of judges (oidores) in
the Lima audiencia, for example, provides almost a “Who’s Who” guide to late
colonial Lima.24
Yet the high officials of the colonial state were not necessarily synonymous
with the colonial elite. Viceroys had their own courtly circles and retainers rel-
atively autonomous from local society. Earlier in the century, Viceroy Marqués
de Castell dos Rius, for example, had arrived in Lima with twelve advisors, two
pages, two valets, a surgeon, three musicians, two butlers, four cooks, and five
21. For examples, see Aldo Panfichi, “Urbanización temprana de Lima, 1535 –1900,”
in Mundos interiores: Lima 1850 –1950, ed. Aldo Panfichi and Felipe Portcarrero (Lima:
Universidad del Pacífico, 1995), 15 – 42; and Gabriel Ramón, “Urbe y orden: Evidencias del
reformismo borbónico en el tejido limeño,” in O’Phelan Godoy, El Perú en el siglo XVIII,
299 – 301.
22. Lyn Lowry, “Forging an Indian Nation: Urban Indians under Spanish Colonial
Control (Lima, Peru, 1535 –1765)” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1991), esp.
146 – 48; Panfichi, “Urbanización temprana,” 30 – 31. For an in-depth study of Lima’s Indian
population, see Jesús Cosamalón Aguilar, Indios detrás de la muralla: Matrimonios indígenas y
convivencia inter-racial en Santa Ana (Lima, 1795 –1820) (Lima: Pontificia Univ. Católica del
Perú, 1999).
23. Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe: Lima, 1760 –1830 (Lima: Mosca Azul,
1984), 54 – 57; Lohmann Villena, Los ministros, passim.
24. Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, 73 –74; Burkholder and Chandler, Biographical
Dictionary, passim.
footmen.25 Viceroys and royal bureaucrats also recruited advisors, as Viceroy

Manso de Velasco would do with Louis Godin, a French savant who played a
prominent role in the rebuilding of Lima. He also counted on five key aides:
Tomás Durán, Pedro José Bravo de Lagunas y Castillas, José de la Cuadra,
Francisco Ramón de Herboso y Figueroa, and Antonio de Boza y Garcés.26 At
the center of the Bourbon Reforms and absolutism in general was the attempt
to shift political power away from local elites and towards the colonial state.
In the eighteenth century the boundaries between different ethnic groups
became increasingly blurred. Instead, a single distinction between “gente decente”
(decent people) and the plebe took hold. Nonetheless, intellectuals discussed
race almost obsessively in virtually every treatise or representation from the
period.27 Lima was a multiethnic city. A 1700 census divided the inhabitants
into four categories: 56 percent white, 12 percent Indian, 10 percent mulatto,
and 22 percent black, in a total population of 34,724. A 1790 document further
divided the population into nine ethnic groups. It calculated that Spaniards
(“whites” in the 1700 census) made up 38 percent of the city’s population,
blacks 18 percent, mulattos 12 percent, mestizos 9 percent, Indians 8 percent,
zambos (Indian and black descent) 7 percent, and other groups less than 5 per-
cent each. The population total was 49,443.28
Lima’s different classes rubbed elbows on a daily basis. They met in the
Plaza de Armas or other public areas and often shared roofs, if not living
arrangements. Travelers noted, in many cases with dismay, the multiethnic
nature and vibrant street culture of Lima, as well as the opulence of the city
and its multihued, frequently truculent lower classes. Amédee Frezier, a naval
captain, who, like other French (and English) travelers, emphasized the politi-
cal weaknesses and the social excesses of the population of Spanish America,
described sumptuous festivities such as the two blocks paved with silver for the
entrance of Viceroy de la Palata in 1682.29 Frezier and other authors criticized
25. Rubén Vargas Ugarte, S. J., Historia del Perú, Virreinato (Siglo XVIII) 1700 –1790, 5
vols. (Lima: Librería e Impr. Gil, 1956), 3:73.
26. Conde de Superunda, Relación de gobierno; Moreno Cebrián, “Introducción,” 20.
27. For important examinations on race in eighteenth-century Lima, see Luis
Eduardo Wuffarden, “Los lienzos del virrey Amat y la pintura limeña del siglo XVIII”; and
Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, “Los colores de la plebe: Razón y mestizaje en el Perú
colonial,” in Los cuadros de mestizaje del Virrey Amat, ed. Natalia Majluf (Lima: Museo de
Arte de Lima, 1999).
28. Pérez Cantó, Lima, 49 – 52.
29. Amadeo Frezier, Relación del viaje por el mar del sur (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,
1982), 191– 92. Among the many works on scientific expeditions of the eighteenth century,
the elite’s superficiality while condemning the licentiousness of the city’s lower
classes and, often, of the female population. Months after the earthquake, in
an attempt to placate divine wrath, the church drew up strict dress codes for
women.30 Still later, an anonymous account of Lima, apparently written in the
1770s, claimed that blacks and mulattos made up more than half of the city’s
population and contended that “it is impossible that there is another country
in the world where these people are as licentious as here.”31 The 1746 earth-
quake literally threw Lima’s different people together, bringing to light deep
social tensions.32
The arid coastal strip of western South America, near the steep slopes of
the Andes, did not provide Lima with easily available stone or wood for build-
ing. In fact, the wood-burning kilns used for making bricks led to the defor-
estation of the Lima hinterland by the seventeenth century. Ships brought
stone from Panama and Arica and cedar and oak from Guayaquil, Nicaragua,
and Chile.33 Colonial builders, consequently, relied on the prehispanic prac-
tice of using flexible materials such as adobes or wattle and daub made from
mud plaster and bamboo or other reeds. In the absence of rain, houses had
light roofs, a key explanation for the relatively small death toll in the earth-
see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation ( New York:
Routledge, 1992), ch. 2; and Antonio Lafuente and Antonio Mazuecos, Los caballeros del
punto fijo: Ciencia, política y aventura en la expedición geodésica hispanofrancesa al virreinato del
Perú en el siglo XVIII (Madrid: SERBAL/CSIC, 1987).
30. Conde de Superunda, Relación de gobierno; Moreno Cebrián, “Introducción,” 67.
31. Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, “Descripción de la ciudad de Lima, capital del
Reino del Perú, su temperamento, opulencia, carácter de sus naturales y comercio, con
algunas reflexiones sobre la frecuencia de temblores y carencia de lluvias en su valle y sus
inmediaciones,” doct. 1438. A few references make me believe that it dates from the 1770s.
Some authors have contended that Louis Godin, a key participant in the story told here,
was the author. See Jean-Paul Duviols, “Descripción de la Ciudad . . .” in Cultures et sociétés:
Andes et Méso-Amérique. Mélanges en hommage à Pierre Duviols, ed. Raquel Thiercelin, 2
vols. (Provence: Université de Provence, 1991), 1:251– 97.
32. On social geography, see María Antonia Durán Montero, Lima en el siglo XVII:
Arquitectura, urbanismo y vida cotidiana (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1994);
Lowry, “Forging an Indian Nation”; Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe. On changing social
divisions in eighteenth-century Spanish America, see Morse, “Urban Development”;
Basadre, La multitud; and Patricia Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 62 no. 4 (1982): 569 – 606.
33. Emilio Harth Terré and Felipe Márquez Abanto, “Las bellas artes en el virreynato
del Peru: Historia de la casa urbana virreynal de Lima,” Revista del Archivo Nacional del Perú
24, no. 1 (1962): 170 –75.
quakes of 1687 and 1746. These calamities confirmed the advantage of light
and flexible materials.34 Property owners often camouflaged these rustic mate-
rials by painting the walls with bright colors or giving them the appearance of
stone. Ground seashells provided the paste for whitewash, while indigo and
red ocher brightened walls.
Churches and the houses of Lima’s affluent society counted on grandiose
facades, high walls, and wooden balconies and doors to distinguish their struc-
tures from more humble ones that, in fact, were built of the same material
and techniques. The San Francisco, La Merced, and San Agustín churches,
built in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with stunningly
elaborate facades, were marvelous examples of baroque architecture in Peru.
Earlier, the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo contrasted the sumptuous furniture and fix-
tures of the residences of Lima’s upper classes with their barren outer walls,
but by the eighteenth century property owners were everywhere commission-
ing ornate exteriors.35 In fact, Raúl Porras Barrenechea, a discerning student
and enthusiast of colonial Peru, pointed out the similarities between eighteenth-
century Lima and its elite inhabitants: elaborate and even cold on the outside
yet warm and gracious inside.36 Intricate iron and bronze gates, windows, and
inner doors gave work to the city’s artisans and shielded the homes of the
upper classes in the eighteenth century. These structures concealed, in both
the physical and social sense, the upper classes from the lower orders. Alberto
Flores Galindo likens Havana, deemed by Alejo Carpentier “the city of columns,”
to Lima, “the city of rejas” or gates and grilles.37 The rejas vividly reflected
both the increasingly public and ostentatious expressions of wealth and power,
and the fear of social upheaval in eighteenth-century Lima.
34. The increased use of quincha after the 1687 earthquake is documented in
Humberto Rodríguez-Camilloni, “Tradición e innovación en la arquitectura del virreinato
del Perú: Constantino de Vasconcelos y la invención de la arquitectura de quincha en Lima
durante el siglo xvii,” Arte, historia e identidad en América: Visiones comparativas. XVII
Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, ed. Gustavo Curiel, Renato Gónzalez Mello,
and Juana Gutiérrez Haces (Mexico City: UNAM, 1994), 387 – 403.
35. “Y con ser las casas de esta ciudad en lo interior tan capaces, alegres y lustrosas,
tienen por de fuera ruin apariencia, lo uno por ser las paredes de adobes, y las más por
enlucir; y lo otro, por tener los techos llanos de azoteas y sin corriente.” Bernabé Cobo,
Fundación de Lima (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1956 [1639]), 308.
36. Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Perspectiva y panorama de Lima (Lima: Entre Nous,
1997), 29. In this passage he was referring to women but in others he includes men in this
simile.
37. Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, 79 – 80.
Lima’s colonial houses followed the Mediterranean enclosed-courtyard

style, with the sitting room (sala) and dining room (cuadra) off to the side of
the first patio, and the bedrooms across from them on the far side of the patio.
In the more luxurious houses, the kitchen and servant quarters were found in
the back, off a second patio. Owners often rented out rooms with street access
to petty merchants and shopkeepers, who lived in built-in lofts. Where houses
had two stories, stairs were in the first patio, sometimes built into the sitting
room. Oratorios or prayer rooms were also often found in the sitting room and
served as important places of refuge and supplication during earthquakes.38
The earthquake damaged virtually all of Lima’s residences and erased or
weakened, at least temporarily, a number of other social markers. Although
the houses of the elite initially fared better thanks to the stability of their
wooden door and window frames, their heavy walls and facades often fell,
causing great damage. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, mem-
bers of Lima’s upper core camped in plazas and empty fields, put on any cloth-
ing that they could salvage, and hustled for food and water. In his memoirs,
the viceroy himself described sleeping in a tent in the Plaza de Armas.39 The
catastrophe also weakened social control. The danger of mass looting and even
social chaos terrified the Lima population. The colonial state exerted every
effort to impose order.
People besieged Callao in pursuit of unprotected riches, digging for gold,
silver, and other valuables, and stripping rings and other jewelry from cadav-
ers. Others lined the beaches to gather the goods washed up on shore, while
thieves took advantage of the smoke and chaos in Lima to ransack the totter-
ing houses of the affluent. The viceroy formed three armed patrols “to repress
the insolence of the people, principally that of blacks and slaves.”40 He also set
up gallows in Lima and Callao, sent additional soldiers to patrol the city center
and the beaches, ordered that the partially destroyed royal armory and royal
mint be guarded carefully, and threatened that thieves would be hanged imme-
diately.41 In addition, he named officials in different neighborhoods to super-
38. Harth-Terré and Márquez Abanto, “Las bellas artes,” 109 – 206, esp. 120 – 27. For a
description of Lima’s architecture in the 1740s, see Juan de Ulloa, Viaje a América
meridonial (Madrid: Historia 16, 1990), 44 – 96.
39. Conde de Superunda, Relación, 261.
40. Padre Pedro Lozano, “Relación del Terremoto que arruinó a Lima e Inundó al
Callao el 28 de Octubre de 1746,” in Odriozola, Terremotos, 45.
41. For a good summary of his actions, see E. W. Middendorf, Perú: Observaciones y
estudios del país y sus habitantes durante una permanencia de 25 años (Lima: Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1973), 1:106. See also Conde de Superunda, Relación,
260 – 63.
vise burials as well as to impose “quietud y buen orden” and commanded, in order
to discourage looting, that food be distributed only in the Plaza de Armas.42
The Marquis de Obando bitterly noted, however, that “the utterly crude plebe
robbed many people, and although our viceroy punished some thieves, he did
not manage to intimidate them, since the houses of the most powerful were
abandoned, and their owners dazed.”43
Discussions of crime in colonial Peru inevitably entailed race, and dis-
course following the 1746 earthquake was no exception. José Eusebio Llano y
Zapata, a leading intellectual who wrote several accounts of the earthquake,
commented that thieves and looters abounded “above all in Peru in which the
difference in nations has made a miscellany of colors and those less inclined to
blush are more inclined to larceny and insults such as these damn rebels.”44
Every first-person account referred to the lower classes’ propensity to theft
and the slaves’ penchant for fleeing their owners. The marquis de Obando
claimed that in late November, blacks, in order to loot the city, had prompted
thousands of people to scurry to the hills to the east by spreading rumors
about an impending tidal wave.45 A 300-page memorandum about the contro-
versies in rebuilding the city includes several passages about the ransacking of
wood from destroyed or damaged homes. Although the houses surrounding
the Plaza de Armas had initially fared better than most, they fell prey to ran-
sackers who sold wood at inflated prices. The report claimed that the “licen-
tious and uncontrollable” plebe had stolen all of the wood that had withstood
the earthquake, grabbing pieces of timber from debris and tearing boards from
standing houses. Because almost all of the city’s population —“nobles and
plebes, large and small families”— found shelter in temporary huts with rustic
wood frames, the thieves had no problem finding desperate buyers. Nothing
could be done to stop trade in this valuable lumber.46 One unfortunate owner
42. Vargas Ugarte, Historia del Perú, 3:267 – 68. On the centrality of provisioning cities
in order to maintain control of them in early modern France, see the essays in Edo and
Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Period, ed. James McClain, John M.
Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994).
43. Marqués de Obando, “Carta,” 47 – 48.
44. “Carta o diario que escribió D. José Eusebio de Llano y Zapata a su más venerado
amigo y docto corresponsal el Dr. D. Ignacio Chirivoga y Daza, Canónigo de la Santa
Iglesia de Quito,” in Terremotos, ed. Odriozola, 70 –108, quote from 77 –78.
45. Marqués de Obando, “Carta,” 70 –73. This panic is mentioned in AGI, Audiencia
de Lima, Leg. 511, 164.
46. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 509, “Expediente sobre la oportunidad de rebajar
los capitales. . . .” While condemning the lower classes, the author emphasized how the
catastrophe had cut social differences, or at least made living conditions more equitable.
lamented that after the earthquake had snapped most of his house’s beams,
thieves had taken all the wood that they could lay their hands on and in the
following weeks walls collapsed.47 Nuns complained that thieves compounded
the convents’ problems by stealing wood.48
Descriptions of the earthquake made clear that only the determined mea-
sures taken by Viceroy Manso de Velasco prevented the complete breakdown
of social control. The “Desolation of the city of Lima” depicted “Blacks and
the slaves dedicating themselves to looting deserted ruins” and the “increas-
ingly confident plebe” stealing unprotected goods.49 In the 1740s, just before
and after the earthquake, the viceregal state faced the Juan Santos Atahualpa
uprising in the central jungle east of Lima. Their difficulties in defeating Juan
Santos in a region not too distant from Lima heightened their insecurity after
the earthquake. Concern over a mass uprising shaped the policies and lan-
guage of the colonial state. Viceroy Manso de Velasco enacted harsh measures
to ensure social control, while local authors pointed out the danger of social
chaos, portraying the lower classes as opportunists seizing on the chance to
steal. No author invoked the threat of an uprising, but it was undoubtedly not
very far from colonial minds.50
Rebuilding the City: Stabilizing the Unstable
After the initial measures taken to assure supplies of food and water and to
restore social control, Viceroy Manso de Velasco and city council officials
turned to the question of how to rebuild Lima. They surveyed the area east of
Because wood was an expensive commodity, builders used it sparingly in Lima, primarily to
frame doorways and openings and for choice doors. For the controversy over the price of
wood, see AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511.
47. Archivo General de la Nación, (Lima) Real Audiencia, Causas Civil, Leg. 111,
c. 937, 1750, 8 f.
48. “Discordia de la concordia, Manifiesto apologetico por la Jurisdicción Real, en
respuesta de un libro, que con título de Concordia de la Discordia en un punto grave de
Inmunidad Eclesiástica escribió el Lic. Alonso de la Cueva Ponce de León, Profesor en un
tiempo de jurisprudencia” (Lima, n.d.).
49. Montero de Aguila, Desolación, 7 – 8. See the letter from Manso dated June 20,
1748, in AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, f. 1– 4.
50. On Juan Santos, see Stefano Varese, La sal de los cerros (Lima: Retablo de Papel,
1973); Steve J. Stern, “The Age of Andean Insurrection, 1742 –1782: A Reappraisal,” in
Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, Eighteenth to Twentieth
Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 34 – 93.
Lima and discussed the possibility of moving the city.51 Those in favor empha-
sized that the present site would never be free of the danger of an earthquake,
recalling the devastation of 1687 and many others.52 The viceroy rejected this
plan, however, primarily because of its cost. He calculated that rebuilding else-
where would require at least 300 million pesos, an enormous sum. Building a
new cathedral alone would demand at least 7.5 million pesos, while repairing it
would require only 1.1 million. He also mentioned the high cost of construct-
ing walls around the city and the expense of a presidio to protect it.53 As would
occur in Lisbon ten years later, authorities turned down a proposal to move
the damaged city because of the high cost.54
The city council also presented other arguments against a move. They
began with the legalistic or formal point that the viceroy did not have the
king’s permission and thus could not even begin to make a decision. They then
emphasized the population’s opposition to the move. Among many other dis-
advantages, the authors stressed that the empty fields and buildings of the
abandoned city would become a haven for thieves and vagrants. They worried
that giving runaways such a prime place to relocate would further swell the
ranks of maroons and weaken the institution of slavery. This image of blacks
and other lower-class groups operating independently from a devastated Lima
represented one of the primary fears, perhaps nightmares, of the city’s elite.
Finally, they pointed out that the move would invalidate the array of obliga-
tions and loans (censos) between religious orders and property owners. Not
only would this ruin the orders economically but it would be the “seed of end-
less conflicts and lawsuits.”55 By early 1747, authorities no longer considered
moving Lima.
51. They considered the Lurigancho valley at the foot of the San Bartolomé hill, to
the east. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511.
52. Günther Doering and Lohmann Villena, Lima, 130.
53. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 27b.
54. For the comparisons I have relied on Stephen Tobriner, “Earthquakes and
Planning in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Architectural Education
33, no. 4 (Summer, 1980): 11–15, and his “La Casa Baraccata: Earthquake-Resistant
Construction in Eighteenth-Century Calabria,” Society of Architectural Historians 42, no. 2
(May 1983): 131– 8. On Lisbon, I have also used C. R. Boxer, “Some Contemporary
Reactions to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755,” Revista de Facultade de Letras (Universidade de
Lisboa) 22, 2nd series, no. 2 (1956): 113 –29; C. R. Boxer, “Pombal’s Dictatorship and the
Great Lisbon Earthquake, 1755,” History Today (1955): 729 – 36; T. D. Kendrick, The Lisbon
Earthquake (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1955).
55. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 32 – 37. On the earthquake and censos, see
Aldana Rivera, “¿Ocurrencias del Tiempo?” 167 – 94.
Instead, the viceregal regime created an elaborate plan to rebuild the city
in such a way as to minimize future damage from earthquakes. The French
astronomer, mathematician, and architect Louis Godin oversaw the rebuilding
efforts. A member of the Paris Academy of Sciences since 1725, Godin, together
with Charles Marie de la Condamine and Pierre Bouguer and accompanied by
the Spanish naval officers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, led the 1735 sci-
entific expedition to determine whether the earth flattened at the equator, as
Jean Dominique Cassini contended, or at its poles, as Newton and his fol-
lowers believed. While successful in scientific terms — they confirmed the
oblateness of the earth — the expedition was beset by internal squabbles, harsh
conditions, and economic problems.56 In 1744, Godin took the chair in math-
ematics at San Marcos University in Lima, where he stayed until 1751. In his
efforts to rebuild Lima, Godin proved himself to be a technically sophisti-
cated, forthright supporter of strict building codes, a trait that would earn him
the enmity of many of the city’s leading families. Many saw him as an intruder
arrogantly attempting to impose order on a unruly city, a view that paralleled
the reaction many of the Spanish American elite had to the Enlightenment
and the Bourbon Reforms.57
Godin worked very quickly, presenting his report on November 10, 1746,
less than two weeks after the earthquake. He recommended widening streets,
limiting the height of buildings, prohibiting arched towers, replacing stone
structures with wattle and daub (quincha), and assuring adequate plazas and
public space to serve as refuge in case of disasters. He called for streets at least
twelve varas wide (0.84 meters or a bit less than a yard) and outer walls no
higher than four varas (which was increased to five varas). The walls would
count on wide bases for support and taper as they rose. The plan prohibited
tall, heavy structures and sought to assure ample space in the streets even if
buildings fell. Because the plan prohibited second stories and thus decreased
living space, he lobbied unsuccessfully for the demolition of Lima’s surround-
56. Lafuente and Mazuecos, Los caballeros; Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity:
A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), ch. 2.
57. This stay in Peru hurt his reputation in France, as de la Condamine and Bouguer,
by now his enemies, questioned his lack of publications and his collaboration with the
Spanish crown. After attempting to regain his place in Paris scientific circles, he died in
Cádiz in 1760, the director of the Armada’s Coast Guard Academy. Lafuente and
Mazuecos, Los caballeros, esp. 142 – 46 and, for a portrait, 61; Philip Keenan, “Astronomy in
the Viceroyalty of Peru,” in Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional, ed. A. Lafuente, A.
Elena, and M. L. Ortega (Madrid: Doce Calles/Univ. Autónoma de Madrid, 1993),
297 – 305.
ing city walls in order that the city might expand outward. Godin warned
against the dangers of high buildings and church towers, contending that
rebuilding the latter was “to again dig graves.” These reforms were strikingly
similar to the measures taken in Europe after the earthquakes in Sicily in 1693
and in Lisbon in 1755, where urban reformers also sought to widen streets and
plazas in order to assure escape routes, hinder looting, and provide camping
space. The disasters in Europe served as opportunity and pretext to implement
the Renaissance ideal of wide, straight streets, in sharp contrast to the medieval
pattern of narrow, twisted corridors.58 The debates in Lima resembled those
of Lisbon a decade later.
Some European urban reformers saw the widened streets not only as a
means to rationalize movement and to control the dangerous classes but as a
solution to the chaos, stasis, and inequalities of urban society. In other words,
these urban reforms might have a utopian element. Key Enlightenment fig-
ures such as Rousseau and Voltaire were horrified by conditions in Paris, and
Voltaire himself saw widening its streets as part of the solution to the plight of
the lower classes. Numerous selections of Diderot’s Encyclopédie touted the
advantages of the fluid circulation of air.59 In Peru, however, concerns over
social control, particularly of rebellious slaves and the licentious plebe, molded
a similar project. To justify his measures, Godin reiterated the threat of slaves
fleeing and then settling into abandoned houses. In a supporting document,
Viceroy Manso de Velasco described the challenges he faced in the aftermath
of the earthquake as a consequence of slaves in and around Lima “disobeying
their masters . . . taking over their houses and attempting to keep their belong-
ings,” while the “plebe” robbed at will.60 He blamed Lima’s architecture, con-
tending that the loss of property owners’ dwellings was the root cause of the
chaos following the earthquake. In this lengthy document, Godin, the viceroy,
and representatives of the cabildo repeatedly justified the drastic changes in
building codes in the name of preventing opportunities for slaves to free them-
selves or for the lower classes to rob. In order to accomplish this, Godin and
his commission called for lower, sturdier buildings, ones that would not have
58. Tobriner, “Earthquakes and Planning,” and “La Casa Baraccata.”

59. Vidler, “The Scenes,” 33 – 34. The key figure in this “Enlightenment utopia” was
Abbé Morelly, a precursor (according to Vidler) of utopian socialists and their urban plans
of the early nineteenth century. For a stimulating view of city planning in Renaissance
Paris, see Roger Chartier, “Power, Space, and Investments in Paris,” in Edo and Paris, ed.
James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru, 132 – 52. For a summary of
changing notions of urban order, see Clement, “El nacimiento.”
60. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 244b.
to be abandoned in an earthquake. Because of Peru’s shak y social order, unsta-

ble buildings were unacceptable.
The Junta de Tribunales, which included the president and civil judges of
the Real Audiencia presided over by the viceroy, met on January 9, 1747, to
discuss Godin’s plan, which had been accepted by the cabildo with a few revi-
sions. The greater use of quincha prompted little controversy. Members of the
cabildo had expressed concern that if the walls were too thin, thieves could
burrow in. In response, the junta permitted thicker walls with adobes or
bricks. Some continued to worry about the possibility of outsiders digging into
Lima’s numerous convents or people on horseback peering over outer walls.
These issues were not pursued. The question of the buildings’ height, how-
ever, prompted a controversy that lasted for several years, leaving a volumi-
nous paper trail. Property owners resisted efforts to restrict the height of
structures to five varas. On this question, the property-owning elite of Lima
confronted the Bourbon state, ultimately keeping at bay its efforts at urban
reform.
The Upper Class Defends Its Upper Stories
Godin’s guidelines called for all walls higher than 4.5 varas to be demolished
and for streets to be at least 12 varas wide. In fact, he called for a maximum
height of 4 varas or less if streets were narrower than 12 varas. He sought to
guarantee that even if the walls toppled into the streets, a clear path remained
in the middle. While he quickly conceded to a maximum height of five varas,
he argued that if convents and monasteries needed walls higher than this, they
could place them inside their property line and have smaller rooms. Again we
see the Bourbon reformers at work attempting to restrict the space and power
of the church.61 He initially justified these measures on the need for “private
rights” to cede to “public rights,” criticizing the “vain elevation” of many of
Lima’s buildings. Here, Godin reiterates his countryman Frezier and other
travelers’ condescending view of the Lima upper classes as ostentatious. While
recognizing the sacrifice that his plan required, Godin promoted it assertively.
He noted that “cures rarely come without pain, at times worse even than the
sickness itself.”62
61. This became evident in the conflicts over the censos. On this controversy, see
three very long legajos found in the AGI in Seville: Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 509, Leg. 515,
and Leg. 787, the Autos de Residencia de Manso de Velasco. Pombal also used the
rebuilding of Lisbon to continue his attack on the Jesuits.
62. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 17 –18.
The viceroy backed Godin’s prohibition of two-story structures, asserting

that they endangered “the poor who live in storefronts and narrow homes.”63
The Junta de Tribunales also supported the plan to prohibit second stories and
limit church towers and balconies, but opposed demolishing the walls sur-
rounding the city. Godin’s plan can be interpreted as part of the Bourbons’
efforts to assert their power over the church and secular society. The plan con-
firms Foucault’s observation that “in the eighteenth century one sees the
development of reflection upon architecture as a function of the aims and
techniques of the government of societies. One begins to see a form of politi-
cal literature that addresses what the order of a society should be, what a city
should be, given the requirements of the maintenance of order; given that one
should avoid epidemics, avoid revolts, permit a decent and moral family life,
and so on.”64
On January 16, 1747, workers placed posters in four busy plazas (de
Armas, La Merced, San Juan de Dios, and La Encarnación), and town criers
walked the streets to publicize a decree ordering that all “second stories [altos],
towers, and walls of convents that appear to be in danger of falling” be torn
down. The initial objections to this proposal centered on the demolition and
rebuilding costs. Property owners emphasized the inflated cost of materials
and laborers, noting, for example, that reeds used in quincha cost ten reales
rather than the customary two, and that reliable workers, even if well remu-
nerated, were difficult to find. Viceroy Manso de Velasco asked for a report on
price increases since the October calamity and subsequently established offi-
cial prices, at the same rate or only slightly above those previous ones. Cor-
regidores in outlying areas were asked to encourage Indians to come to work
“voluntarily” in Lima.65
Owners of houses that had second stories designated for demolition
quickly protested Godin’s reforms. On January 21, doñas Inés and Catalina
Ayessa, both nuns, and doña Isidora de Arandia, the widow of don Diego de
Orbea, contended that their houses were in good shape and that the demoli-
tion would impoverish them and force members of their family into the
streets. The prosecutor turned down their petitions but the Junta de Tri-
bunales granted them eight days to present their case. By the end of January,
63. Cited in Vargas Ugarte, Historia, 263.

64. Interview with Paul Rabinow, in James D. Faubion, ed., Space, Knowledge, and
Power ( New York: New Press, 2000), 350.
65. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 17 –18. Authorities frequently discussed ways
to force Indians to work in the city, although in this case no policy was established.
dozens of prominent homeowners, many of them titled nobility, joined

together to fight the measures.
Salvador Gerónimo de Portalanza represented them in the courts, present-
ing highly detailed challenges to the ban on altos on January 24 and, following
rebuttals by the cabildo, in February and May.66 Twenty-four people signed the
document, but Portalanza frequently referred to his efforts as a defense of 300
families. Among those signing were the marquesa de Torre Tagle, the conde de
Torreblanca, and other matriarchs and patriarchs of Lima’s leading families.67
They initially concentrated on four points. First, Portalanza argued at length
that many of the altos or upper stories were already made of quincha and not
only withstood earthquakes, but actually stabilized the entire building. Tearing
down the second story would weaken the house. He provided several examples
and demanded a “certification” or inspection of the condition of two-story
houses. Second, he questioned the viceroy’s right to condemn “respectable
houses.” Citing the medieval Siete Partidas, Portalanza claimed that the viceroy
could only do so if the land was required for “public works, defense, extension
of monasteries, or to build a magnificent building,” if the owner were found
guilty of treason, or if the building had been placed on public property.68 Porta-
lanza and his associates therefore strongly questioned the viceroy’s prerogative
to carry out his plan. Furthermore, he contended that property owners should
be compensated for any buildings torn down or not rebuilt. He did not provide
figures but he clearly sought to make the reforms exorbitantly expensive for the
crown. This constituted a small battle of the larger, incipient struggle over the
implementation of the Bourbon Reforms, within which the viceregal state
attempted to decrease the autonomy of the upper classes.
Third, the property owners asserted that they had a social right and even
an obligation to build grand residences, and that their houses followed the
crown’s mandate to improve cities: “[T]he kingdom’s laws uniformly support
the construction of magnificent monuments in the cities, especially capitals,
66. Pérez-Mallaína demonstrates that don Manuel de Silva y la Banda, a

promiment lawyer and one of the litigants, wrote the longer text from May. Pablo Emilio
Pérez-Mallaína, “La utilización interesada de un desastre natural: El terremoto de Lima en
1746,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 35 (1998): 80.
67. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 65.
68. He referred to Partida 3, Ley 10, Título 32 that ends “Mas si el edificio se
derribasse por terremoto, o por rayo, o por gran viento, o por aguaducho, o por alguna
otra ocasion semejate, entonces no seria tenudo de pechar el daño que por el edificio
viniesee.” Alfonso X, Las Siete Partidas (Salamanca: Andres de Portonaris, 1555 [Madrid:
Boletín Oficial del Estado, 1974]), 2:184.
because decorum, splendor and luster depend on them.”69 They elaborated

this position in the subsequent petitions. Fourth, Portalanza pointed out the
lack of space to build within the walls surrounding the city. In a city so con-
stricted, the destruction of second stories would not only deprive people of a
roof over their heads but also reduce storage space and thus weaken com-
merce. The upper classes tenaciously defended their right to socially presti-
gious two-story buildings.
Portalanza ended with several statements pointing out the social impor-
tance of the property owners he defended. In uncharacteristically convoluted
prose, he reiterated that only one-third of the city, “the most noble and distin-
guished,” had been affected by the decree against second stories and therefore
“not all of the people share this desire” to tear down second stories. He con-
tended that the “barbarous masses [el barbaro bulgo]” should not be taken into
consideration, but rather only “the rational people [el pueblo racional]” who
know that the second stories are the only thing that has protected them in
earthquakes. In other words, although the majority of the population might
want the second stories torn down, their insignificance removed them from
consideration. He repeatedly distinguished the property owners from the mass
of the population, contrasting the generous Spaniards and their elegant homes
to the pusillanimous Indians and their wretched huts. Defending the altos was
at this point a defense of rational and decent people, whose houses loomed
above the city displaying technical advances and good taste, against the vulgar
masses who were ignorant of the basic notions of architecture and lived in
primitive eyesores. Portalanza closed by noting that shipwrecks had not meant
the end of sailing, and thus earthquakes should not doom second stories.70
The city council responded in early February that Portalanza represented
only 300 people and that the majority of the city’s population clamored for the
demolition of altos. The council members pointed out that even after three
months, people had not returned to sleep in the second stories because of their
well-founded fear. According to the cabildo’s response, these people — pre-
sumably including many of the property owners behind Portalanza — knew
that these structures posed a danger. The anonymous representative of the
cabildo then returned to the essence of the viceroy’s arguments: that Lima’s
architecture could not withstand the region’s periodic earthquakes and that the
destruction not only took many lives and destroyed property but also

70. Ibid., Leg. 511, esp. 67 – 90.
prompted chaos. If building methods were not changed, the misery, looting,
and turmoil witnessed in Lima would recur. At this point, the writer left the
usual level of abstraction and descended rhetorically to the streets. He described
vile living quarters and rampant diseases, so horrifying that many survivors
envied those whom had perished in the earthquake. The author insisted that
“private rights” must cede to “public rights.” On February 23, Viceroy Manso
de Velasco upheld the prohibition of second stories.71
Godin, Viceroy Manso de Velasco, and the author of the cabildo response
were not social egalitarians. While attacking the property owners’ vanity,
which they deemed reckless, they did not pretend to banish social distinctions
or question the elite’s right to predominate. They merely sought, in terms of
urban planning, to assure wider streets and lower buildings and, in political
terms, to reduce the clout of Lima’s upper echelon. In a parallel discussion on
rebuilding the cathedral and the difficult balance between the need for safety
and the architectural requirements or expectations of an eminent city such as
Lima, Viceroy Manso de Velasco used the term “moderate ostentation.” This
epitomizes their view of limited, state-regulated architectural grandeur.72
Portalanza appealed three days after the viceroy’s decision, gaining some
time. In April, the cabildo presented another detailed defense of the reforms
and criticism of the property owners, focusing on the danger of second stories,
even with quincha, and on whether the owners had the right to build haz-
ardous structures, no matter how magnificent. The technical arguments included
points such as how quincha fell, whether it had crushed people in October, and
whether it deteriorated over time. The author also reached back, citing the
Recopilación de Indias to show that no compensation was necessary. He coun-
tered the argument presented frequently by Portalanza that classical civiliza-
tions had allowed grandiose buildings, maintaining that the enduring grandeur
of Rome, Venice, Sicily, and Naples merely demonstrated their use of superior
building materials. The author used Constantinople as an example of architec-
tural splendor and egalitarianism: “[T]he learned had the same size house as a
plebe.” Finally, he argued that beauty was not acceptable if it came at the cost
of dangerous structures and that “cities are made for citizens and not citizens
for the city.”73
In a brilliantly crafted rebuttal, Portalanza and Manuel de Silva y la Banda
71. Ibid., Leg. 511.

72. Ibid., Leg. 419.
73. Ibid., Leg. 511.
responded with over 100 points justifying the maintenance of the altos.74 They
developed the arguments made in the previous rebuttal, breaking them up into
dozens of points and providing many examples and citations. Although they
insisted less on the question of whether the viceroy had the right to condemn
and prohibit second stores, they developed with exquisite detail, clarity, and
style their other three key contentions: that, in light of the lack of land within
the walls and the high price of goods and labor, they could not afford to give
up (the upper) half of their property; that altos did not endanger the city but
actually made buildings stronger; and that they had the right to loom above
the city. This last social justification sustained these legal, economic, and tech-
nical arguments.
They emphasized that the ban on second stories could not come at a more
inappropriate time: a devastated economy with inflation and shortages and a
city with no space to expand within its walls. Portalanza and Silva y la Banda
detailed the high price of bricks, adobe, and workers and the sorry shape of the
owners’ personal finances. They argued that even if the money were available,
there was little empty space to build within the walls of Lima. Churches and
public institutions such as the mint and the Inquisition had been expanding
into plazas and adjacent plots, people continued camped out in makeshift huts
and tents on church grounds, plazas, and the few empty fields, and real estate
prices had escalated. They noted that if they were to rebuild single-story
houses, they would need larger plots, 40 by 80 varas rather than 20 by 60. For
these reasons (and others), they had to remain where their houses were or had
been.
They provided several explanations why they could not simply move into
the first floor. They argued that the high cost of building materials and labor-
ers made converting two-story houses into a single story impossibly expensive.
Furthermore, the loss of the second stories would have dramatically reduced
the size of elite residences. It was not merely a matter of squeezing into the
first floor, they contended, as these were used for servants and carriages, or
rented as stores. In terms of both design and status, therefore, they were not
appropriate for their standard of living. Not only would they have had to make
do with less space or endeavor to purchase additional property, they also faced
the loss of income from renting parts of both the first and second stories. Sixty
years earlier, in fact, in the wake of the 1687 earthquake, property owners had
74. Pérez-Mallaína highlights the rhetorical merits of this document. Pérez-Mallaína,

“La utilización interesada.”
opposed bans on second stories because of the threat to rental income.75

Unable to rebuild elsewhere or relocate into their first floor, the property
owners contended that they needed to maintain or rebuild their second sto-
ries. Several times they invoked the horrors of 300 leading families forced to
move out of Lima.
They insisted that the altos were safe. They pointed out that many people
had been killed by low walls, giving the example of the family of Pablo de Ola-
vide, later to become an important voice of the Enlightenment in Spain. Ola-
vide lost his parents and sister when their one-story house on the corners of
Nuñez and Filipinas Streets collapsed in the earthquake.76 They countered the
cabildo’s arguments about the durability of quincha, and time after time
demanded an inspection in order to show that altos with this material had
stood up well in the earthquake. They noted that the area within three or four
blocks of the Plaza Mayor, where the two-story houses were located, was the
center of rebuilding activities, while more distant areas, which only had single-
story houses, were ruined and largely deserted. The activity around the plaza
showed that the altos had endured and that the owners were not fearful.77
They dismissed people’s fear of tall structures, labeling it several times “super-
stitious.”
While Portalanza and Silva y la Banda demonstrated with detail and verve
the lack of alternatives to the two-story houses and their safety for the owners
and others, they never strayed far from the argument that the upper classes
had the social right and perhaps even obligation to rise above the city’s lower
orders. They repeated in various forms that the 300 families they represented
were not of the “vulgar classes” but rather “the foremost in the city.” They also
ridiculed the idea that Lima should be rebuilt “with reed huts, reducing the
capital of the Peruvian kingdom into a town of barbarous Indians . . . rather
than magnificent houses.” They noted that the low houses with small rooms
fostered diseases. Just as Godin envisioned wide streets facilitating the circula-
tion of air, they stressed their need to rise above the unhealthy, humid, and
crowded streets. At one point they suggested that all houses should be two sto-
ries but they only did so in passing. They therefore did not address the ques-
75. Durán Montero, Lima en el siglo XVI, 40 – 41.

76. They also lost their store and many investments. Pablo de Olavide wrote a short
novel, Teresa, o el terremoto de Lima, in Obras selectas (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú,
1987), on the disaster, which I examine elsewhere.
77. They did not address counterarguments such as the wealth of owners in these
areas or the viceregal state’s preference for this core area.
tion of how the majority of the city’s residents were to avoid the hazards of low
buildings. To confront the cabildo and Godin’s argument for more consistent
or harmonious housing, they summoned the grandeur of classical architecture
and its use of heavy materials and celebration of social hierarchies.
The property owners made clear their concern about losing a key marker
of their respectability. The two-story houses, as well as the heavy facades and
elaborate grillwork, distinguished their residences from those of the middle
and lower orders. The cabildo response itself had stressed that even houses
that cost over 100,000 pesos “were held up just by an adobe wall.” In other
words, behind the intricate exteriors, the houses of the elite and of the lower
orders were essentially the same.78 The property owners thus stressed the need
to distinguish their houses with elaborate fronts and second stories. They did
not attempt to mask this concern but instead touted the taller houses as a
social right, one that differentiated them from the lower classes.
Their argument ultimately centered on the convergence of their right to
have tall buildings, and the social benefits of these structures for an eminent
city such as Lima: “[T]he grandeur of the city and the magnificence of its
buildings are the true common good that links everyone.” In essence, they
expressed the Renaissance notion that a city’s nobility or grandeur depended
on the splendor of its buildings. Richard Kagan deftly summarizes this idea
and its debt to Leon Battista Alberti: “[A]s Alberti understood, civitis resided in
architecture: a monumental church, a spacious square, a sumptuous palace, an
imposing perimeter wall, even the city’s physical fabric, especially one orga-
nized in accordance with an ordered, symmetrical plan of the kind that Alberti,
together with other Renaissance architectural theorists, considered the epit-
ome of urban designs.”79 Portalanza and Silva y la Banda argued that rebuild-
ing their second-story houses (and presumably ornate facades and balconies)
benefited not only the owners, but the city of Lima as a whole, which as a
viceregal capital required distinguished architecture. They were not self-
centered patriarchs putting their comfort and finances ahead of the city’s
safety, but rather leading citizens who sought to resurrect Lima’s magnificence
and glory.

79. Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World 1493 –1793 ( New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 21. See also Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance
Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), 69 – 83; and for Lima, Luis Eduardo
Wuffarden, “La Ciudad y sus emblemas: Imágenes del criollismo en el virreinato del Perú,”
in Los Siglos de Oro en los virreinatos de América, 1550 –1700 (Madrid: Museo de América,
2000), 59 –75.
Their petition refuted specific points made by the cabildo. For example,
they ridiculed the use of Constantinople as a model, noting that it had differ-
ent and inferior customs, laws, and religion than Spain and Peru. The authors
also at one point discounted the argument that they were a small minority,
noting that the church (convents, monasteries, cofradias, and congregations)
and hospitals needed to rise above a single story. They did not press this point,
however, instead stressing their small numbers but social significance and the
value or benefits that grandiose buildings would bring to a devastated Lima.
The property owners clearly thought that the viceroy and his French
advisor were taking matters too much into their hands. They did not believe
that the viceroy and the cabildo should have a free hand in redesigning the
city. In this controversy, the upper classes voiced their opposition to the strong,
interventionist policies of the Bourbon state. They did this in the courts, pre-
senting a profound critique of the project while also gaining time by dragging
the case into the legal system. Their economic, social, and political concerns
coalesced into a cohesive, and in this particular case often dazzling, defense of
the prerogatives of the upper classes. Here we see one of the first of many skir-
mishes between Peru’s elite and the viceregal state over the implementation of
the Bourbons’ absolutist project.
Viceroy Manso de Velasco and the members of the cabildo faced months
of pressure and ultimately relented. Cabildo members came from Lima’s finest
families, and many of them had two-story houses. They no doubt sympathized
with the owners. The decision also probably reflected the impressive technical
arguments made by the property owners. Their insistence that the altos had
withstood the earthquake, verifiable with a short stroll from the Plaza Mayor,
seemed convincing. In November 1747 Manso de Velasco ordered a house-
by-house inspection to review which upper floors could be maintained. He
instructed that although all of those made of adobe had to be torn down, those
of wattle and daub that appeared sturdy could remain. In effect, the inspectors
called for many tall walls and arches to be torn down or at least reduced in
height, but rarely condemned the second stories.80 In his memoirs, the conde
de Superunda justified his policy reversal by recognizing the lack of plots on
which to build new houses in the city and the fact that adobe houses with
wood-framed second stories had, in fact, survived the earthquake.81 Yet in a
1748 letter, he recognized with clear bitterness the “very efficient” legal strug-
80. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 205 – 20.

81. Conde de Superunda, Relación, 264 – 65.
gle against the reforms.82 The property owners had succeeded in defending
their second stories in the face of Louis Godin’s reforms.
This legal battle was not the only, or even the greatest, controversy sur-
rounding Viceroy Manso de Velasco’s efforts. The colonial state was besieged
by destitute landowners who claimed that the damage or even destruction of
their property made it impossible for them to make interest payments on their
obligations and debts to the church, their censos. The church, in turn, con-
tended that its different elements had lost considerable property and desper-
ately needed money in order to rebuild churches, monasteries, and convents
and to aid those in need. Manso de Velasco crafted a delicate compromise, cut-
ting the principal in half and interest rates by more than 50 percent and grant-
ing a two-year grace period. This satisfied neither lenders nor borrowers, and
the battle between censualistas and censuatarios continued in the courts for more
than a decade.83 Curiously, property owners who in the discussion about altos
stressed these buildings’ stability, in these lawsuits emphasized and probably
exaggerated their losses. The church, on the other hand, contended that the
devastation was much less than initially believed. In rebuilding Lima, Viceroy
conde de Superunda found himself in the middle of a battle between the
church and property owners, a confrontation complicated by the fact that all
of the elite families had members in the church and others held appointments
in the audiencia. Conflicts over the rebuilding of Lima therefore not only
involved the state, and the upper and lower classes, but spilled over into
church-state relations as well.84 As was the case with the battle between elite
property owners and the viceroy, the church-state conflict was one forerunner
of an enduring standoff. With the broader implementation of the Bourbon
Reforms in the second half of the eighteenth century, relations between the
church and state worsened.85
82. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 2, letter from 20 June 1748.
83. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Legs. 509 and 515. For a good summary, see Alfonso W.
Quiroz, Deudas olvidadas: Instrumentos de crédito en la economía colonial peruana 1750 –1820
(Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993), 47 – 54.
84. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 509; the Archivo del Cabildo Metropolitano de
Lima also holds important sources on this conflict. For an overview, see Vargas Ugarte,
Historia del Perú, 4:274 –76.
85. Key works on this subject include Nancy Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial
Mexico, 1759 –1821: The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege (London: Athlone Press, 1968); D. A.
Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán, 1749 –1810
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
Conclusions
The earthquake and its aftermath altered Lima’s architectural and political
landscape. The catastrophe destroyed many classic churrigueresque buildings,
and urban reformers wreaked more damage in the following decades. Altars,
facades, and buildings were demolished, often replaced by neoclassical struc-
tures. In ordinary private houses, the increased use of flat roofs and of quincha
and adobe stand out. Paradoxically, in their efforts to create a viceregal capital
that might reflect their increasingly centralized power in their colonies, the
Bourbons relied on the building techniques of quincha and adobe, derived
from prehispanic societies. Less elaborate arches and facades, if any, would
grace new or rebuilt churches and the dwellings of distinguished residents.
French styles became increasingly popular. Although Louis Godin and Viceroy
Superunda eventually relented in their struggle with the upper classes and
their higher buildings, lower walls, and, in general, lower buildings were more
common after 1746. Not only did style and techniques change but the kind of
building changed as well. In the more secular world of the late eighteenth cen-
tury, new construction centered on civic rather than ecclesiastical buildings.
These included, by the century’s end, a theater, a coliseum, a bullring, a poor
house, and a botanical garden.86 In fact, secularization and afrancesamiento took
place within houses as some owners converted prayer rooms or oratorios into
salons.87
In comparing the rebuilding of Lima to that of several European cities in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more similarities than contrasts can
be found. The changes envisioned by Godin paralleled those in Sicily in the
late seventeenth century and in Lisbon in 1755: widening (and in Europe the
straightening) of streets, assuring adequate public plazas for escape and refuge,
86. In fact, the earthquake made the houses seem even lower, as much of the rubble
remained on the streets, raising them slightly and making the houses appear sunken.
Harth-Terré and Márquez Abanto, “Las bellas artes,” 187. On architectural changes, see
Ramón, “Urbe y orden,” 318; Basadre, “La multitud,” 101– 5; Günther Doering and
Lohmann Villena, Lima, 133 – 39. For a description, particularly of the plainer facades, see
Johann Jakob von Tschudi, Testimonio del Perú, 1838 –1842, translated by Elsa de Sagasti
(Lima: Consejo Económico Consultative Suiza–Peru, 1966), 80 – 92. In the late 1770s,
Hipólito Ruíz wrote, “Now the houses are very low, with the exception of a few whose
owners, regardless of the threat of earthquakes, have built them up again,” The Journals of
Hipólito Ruíz, Richard Evans Schultes and María José von Thenen de Jaramillo-Arango,
translators (Portland: Timber Press, 1988), 55.
87. Hector Velarde, Arquitectura peruana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1946), 106 –7.
and making earthquake-resistant buildings. In the case of Lima, which deserves

more mention in the history of antiseismic architecture and city planning,
these efforts focused on creating stout buildings with more flexible materials.
Rulers in Europe also faced resistance to their plans. Landowners, for exam-
ple, vetoed a plan to widen all of the streets in postearthquake Lisbon because
of its cost and inconvenience. As in Lima, a compromise was reached. Under
the guidance of the marquis of Pombal, most of the city was rebuilt as it had
been before the calamity, while the layout of only the areas most damaged was
radically altered.88
If we characterize the outcome of Godin’s plan as a compromise between
the state and elite property owners, it must be understand as an agreement
based on an unstable foundation riven with apprehension and mistrust. The
balance of power in colonial Peru was precarious. The property owners’ resis-
tance to viceregal urban reforms, as well as the above-mentioned church-state
conflict, demonstrate the obstacles faced by the Bourbons in attempting to
impose their vision of Lima. In his memoirs, Manso de Velasco describes his
cautious efforts with the Lima upper classes and the church, bringing to mind
the Habsburgs’ focus on consensus more than vigorous absolutism. Yet con-
flicts were inevitable as the viceregal state sought to centralize power in the
course of the eighteenth century. The 1746 earthquake brought to light and
accentuated the tensions that would mark the viceroyalty until independence.
In the latter decades of the eighteenth century, alongside the better-known fis-
cal, military, and administrative reforms, the Bourbon rulers pushed for an
elaborate plan to improve Lima’s sanitation and public order through stricter
codes, decentralized jurisdictions (cuarteles and barrios), and new authorities.
This plan, overseen by the Visitador Jorge Escobedo, floundered in large part
because of disagreements among authorities and the different strata of Lima
society about the nature of the city and how it should be governed.89 The
examination of the earthquake and its aftermath confirms the need to take a
long view in evaluating state and society relations in the context of the Bour-
88. Tobriner, “Earthquakes and Planning,” 13. I am relying on this article for this
section. See also Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), esp. 21– 34.
89. The key document to the urban reforms is Jorge Escobedo, División de Quarteles y
Barrios, e Instrucción para el Establecimiento de Alcaldes de Barrio en la Capital de Lima (Lima:
n.p., 1785). For analysis see Ramón, “Urbe y orden”; as well as Moreno Cebrián,
“Cuarteles, barrios”; and Bernales Ballesteros, Edificación de la Iglesia. Of course,
explanations for the reforms’ failure need to consider not only social tensions but also
administrative incompetence, changes in Europe, and other factors.
bon Reforms. It also demonstrates the benefits of a more culturally focused

analysis.
Viceregal authorities shared the upper classes’ distaste for, and apprehen-
sion about, the lower classes. This allowed the two parties to collaborate and
even unify during peasant rebellions, maroon activities, and the occasional
slave uprising.90 As the case of Lima demonstrates, the tensions and distance
between “the decent people” and the lower classes weighed heavily in the halt-
ing implementation of eighteenth-century reforms. The fear of, and disdain
for, the lower classes — a highly racialized sentiment that became almost a
reflex action in colonial (and postcolonial) Peru — brought the state and the
upper classes together, but not in all circumstances.91 Lima’s upper classes, the
most powerful single group in Spanish South America, chafed at the Bour-
bons’ various reforms, particularly those which affected them, as is the case
with the prohibition of second stories. They proved themselves capable of
challenging viceregal policies, in this case presenting a lucid manifesto of their
notion of space and power and their right to rise above the other inhabitants of
Lima.
As the controversies over rebuilding Lima indicate, political struggles in
the eighteenth century were not limited to the more studied questions of taxes,
governmental positions, and uprisings but at times focused instead on sym-
bolic power. As Godin and Manso de Velasco learned, different groups in
Lima confronted the Bourbons’ efforts to reorder urban society. While the
1746 earthquake appeared to offer Manso de Velasco “a clean slate” on which
to impose his absolutist vision of Lima, he faced many challenges in imple-
menting his plan. Lima’s multiple and overlapping social tensions remained
stubbornly visible on the slate even after the catastrophe.
90. See Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, passim.

91. The loyalty of the Lima upper classes to the crown has been a key topic in debates
about the war of independence in Peru. Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, part 3; Scarlett
O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales: Perú y Bolivia, 1700 –1783 (Cusco:
Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1988).

The Upper Classes and Their Upper Stories Architecture and The Aftermath of The Lima Earthquake of 1746

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The Upper Classes and Their Upper Stories: Architecture and

the Aftermath of the Lima Earthquake of 1746

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Hispanic American Historical Review 83:1

with so vast a Destruction as that which happened lately in this Capital.”2 In

sought to retain the block-by-block symmetry in the aftermath of the earth-

sus to an absolutist government, however, was slow, and Viceroy Manso de

The City of Kings

footmen.25 Viceroys and royal bureaucrats also recruited advisors, as Viceroy

Lima’s colonial houses followed the Mediterranean enclosed-courtyard

Rebuilding the City: Stabilizing the Unstable

58. Tobriner, “Earthquakes and Planning,” and “La Casa Baraccata.”

to be abandoned in an earthquake. Because of Peru’s shak y social order, unsta-

The Upper Class Defends Its Upper Stories

The viceroy backed Godin’s prohibition of two-story structures, asserting

63. Cited in Vargas Ugarte, Historia, 263.

dozens of prominent homeowners, many of them titled nobility, joined

66. Pérez-Mallaína demonstrates that don Manuel de Silva y la Banda, a

because decorum, splendor and luster depend on them.”69 They elaborated

69. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 67.

71. Ibid., Leg. 511.

74. Pérez-Mallaína highlights the rhetorical merits of this document. Pérez-Mallaína,

opposed bans on second stories because of the threat to rental income.75

75. Durán Montero, Lima en el siglo XVI, 40 – 41.

78. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 92.

80. AGI, Audiencia de Lima, Leg. 511, 205 – 20.

and making earthquake-resistant buildings. In the case of Lima, which deserves

bon Reforms. It also demonstrates the beneﬁts of a more culturally focused

90. See Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe, passim.

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