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

On October 28, 1746, at 10:30P.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 imagined 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 Conquest, 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 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 catastrophe "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 aftershocks 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 gastrointestinal 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 military infrastructure. Accounts of the catastrophe and its aftermath agree that his energetic efforts imposed social control, prevented looting, assured food supplies, and provided shelter—in order, ultimately, to reconstruct a safer city. As 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 increasingly 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 eighteenth-century Bourbons could build on the grid or checkerboard street layout established in Lima and the rest of Spanish America at its sixteenth-century foundation. This pattern fit Enlightenment notions of urban order, above all the call for precisely designed streets that facilitated supervision and the circulation of people...