Lima

On January 18, 1535, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1475–1541) founded La Ciudad de Los Reyes (The City of the Kings), or Lima, in the Rímac Valley, six miles inland from what would become the port of Callao. The valley had been part of Pachacamac, a precolonial Andean religious center. In contrast to Mexico, where the Spanish established and built their colonial capital upon the ruins of the imperial center of the Aztecs, Tenochtitlán, Lima was located far from the Andean Inca capital of Cuzco. Pizarro wanted a city and political center on the Pacific and conveniently connected to the sea routes to Panama, Cuba, and Spain.

In 1542 Lima was made the capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, in effect, the imperial political center of all of Spanish South America. From that year until the end of Spanish rule, forty-two viceroys resided in Lima in the Palace of the Viceroys, located on the north side of the Plaza de Armas. In the early twentieth century, this rundown colonial palace was reconstructed as the more stately, neocolonial Palacio de Gobierno, which became the residence of the president of the republic.

Pizarro set the first stone of Lima's cathedral on top of the Puma Inti Temple. "Pizarro ordered Juan Tello to distribute the plots in the order they were designed in the plan," wrote the Spanish soldier and historian Pedro de Cieza de León (ca. 1518–1560). "And they say that Juan Tello, who was knowledgeable in this, remarked that this land would be another Italy and in trade a second Venice because with such a quantity of gold and silver it was impossible for it to be otherwise" (1550/1998, p. 357). Lima, like all Spanish American cities, had been laid out according to a rational grid system inspired by Renaissance thinking on town planning. At the center of the city was a public square, the Plaza de Armas, with eight streets running outward from the corners of the square (and one additional street extending from the southern side of the plaza). Around the square were located the cathedral, the viceregal palace, and the houses of the municipal government. Proximity to the Plaza de Armas indicated the social prestige of the families who lived in fine houses of two stories. The orderliness of the city demonstrated the Spanish attempt to impose rational European structures upon a wild and natural America. In the early seventeenth century, Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616) commented, "The city was beautifully laid out, with a very large square, unless it be a fault that it is too big. The streets are broad and so straight that the country can be seen in four directions from any of the crossroads" (1617/1966, p. 776).

In 1593 Lima had a population of about 13,000 people. By 1614 the population had grown to over 25,000. Africans comprised the largest single group with 10,386, and with the addition of mulattos, the people the Spaniards called negros and pardos, exceeded 11,000. The next largest population group in the city was Spaniards, both American-born criollos and peninsular-born chapetónes, at 9,616. There were 1,978 native Andeans and only 192 mestizos (mixed Spanish-Indian offspring). The small number of mestizos suggests that many sons and daughters of mixed unions lived (and were therefore counted) as Indians or passed as Spaniards. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were more than 36,000 limeños (residents of Lima). By this time, Spaniards were in the majority with 56 percent of the population; Africans and mulattos made up 32 percent; and natives and mestizos constituted only 12 percent.

Compared to Mexico City, Lima was a small city but no less rich or monumental. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Spaniards had discovered the mountain of Potosí, the world's largest deposit of silver, which was controlled from Lima. Merchants, agriculturalists, and miners like Antonio López de Quiroga, acting as a business agent for others or on his own account, brought great sums of money to Lima. The Spanish historian Bernabé Cobo (1580–1657), in his mid-seventeenth-century Historia de la fundación de Lima, wrote of the "trade, splendour, and wealth" of the city. "The commerce and bustle which is always to be seen in this square is very great," wrote Cobo, referring to the Plaza de Armas. "The things to be found in this market are all that a well provisioned republic can desire for its sustenance and comfort" (quoted in Higgins 2005, p. 37). There were in Lima in the seventeenth century fifteen or so mayorazgos (entailed estates) with incomes of 300,000 to 400,000 ducats yearly, but that was exceeded by the total income that flowed annually in salaries to ecclesiastics, royal officials, and military officers. The city's wealth was displayed in churches, houses, luxurious coaches, jewelry and gold and silver plate, tapestries, silks, brocades, fine linens, articles of worship, and African slaves.

The most impressive aspect of Lima in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the size and splendor of its religious establishment. A contemporary report in 1613 stated that there were more than 400 secular priests, about 900 friars, and 1,366 nuns. They worked and lived in nineteen churches, monasteries, and nunneries. One in ten of Lima's inhabitants were clerics. Besides the cathedral and the palace of the archbishop, there were parish churches, monasteries, convents, the house and jail of the Inquisition, separate hospitals for Spaniards and Indians, a hospital for sailors, a house for orphans and another for abandoned women, a doctrinal school for Indians, and schools and colleges.

The church and monastery of San Francisco, with its beautiful twin towers, conventual buildings, and grounds, constituted a city within the city of Lima. It housed more than two hundred monks, with an additional large staff and numerous African slaves in its prime. The convent of the Nuns of the Incarnation housed more than four hundred religious women. "Many of the rich nobles' daughters came to learn good manners, and they leave to marry," wrote Pedro de León Portocarrero in the early seventeenth century. "In this convent there are splendid and intelligent women, endowed with a thousand graces, and all of them, both nuns and lay women, have Black women slaves to serve them" (quoted in Mills and Taylor 1998, p. 170).

Lima was also a city of manufactures and commerce. Artisans and merchants tended to concentrate on particular streets according to specialization. There was the street of the silversmiths, the hatters' ally, the street of the mantas (cloaks), and the main one, Merchants' Street, which had at least forty shops. Many observers described Lima as a city overflowing in wealth. "I am astonished at what they tell me about Castile," noted a resident of Lima in 1590, "that it is finished, and I believe it from what people say here. Here we go neither hungry nor thirsty, nor do we lack for clothing." Another Lima resident writing home to Spain was upset by the news of "the hardship that you suffer in Spain. Since we want for nothing over here, we can hardly believe it" (Kamen 2003, pp. 309-310).

Late colonial Lima was not the great city it had been during its seventeenth-century "silver age." Devastating earthquakes, particularly in 1655, 1687, and 1746, severely damaged the city. The quake of 1746 killed some 6,000 residents and brought down most of the important buildings in the city. After these earthquakes, and the great quake of 1940, few genuine "colonial" buildings remain in Lima.

In 1739 Spain established the new viceroyalty of New Granada (with the viceregal capital of Bogotá and in 1776 the viceroyalty of La Plata (with the viceregal capital of Buenos Aires). This redesign of the political map of Spanish South America not only reduced the prestige and power of Lima but also broke its near commercial monopoly. Goods no longer had to be imported at Callao and Lima and transported by mule train up and down the Andes as far as the port city of Buenos Aires.

By 1812 the population of Lima was close to 64,000. About 18,000 were Spaniards. Spaniards were always a minority in their colonial capital. In this late colonial year, the large majority of limeños were African slaves and free blacks and mulattos—over 30,000 people. There were slightly more than 10,000 Indians living in the city and almost 5,000 mestizos.

During the wars of independence in the years leading up to 1821, Lima quartered the royalist army of some 70,000 men. Despite this occupation, Lima's Creoles demonstrated little interest in revolution and independence. Creole fear of African slaves, blacks and mulattos, and Indians and mestizos—the exploited and subordinated majority—produced a very cautious and conservative local elite. In 1821 when Lima, and Peru, was liberated from Spanish rule and the republic was established, it was the result of the invasion of Peru by a revolutionary general from Argentina, José de San Martín (1778–1850).

see also Inca Empire; Lima; Mining, the Americas; Pizarro, Francisco; Túpac Amaru, Rebellion of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cieza de León, Pedro de. The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter (1550). Edited and translated by Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

de la Vega, Garcilaso. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru (1609/1617). Translated by Harold V. Livermore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966.

Doering, Juan Gunther, and Guillermo Lohmann Villena. Lima. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992.

Higgins, James. Lima: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Kamen, Henry. Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Mills, Kenneth, and William B. Taylor, eds. "Pedro de León Portocarrero's Description of Lima, Peru." In Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History, 165-175. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1998.