Exploring Colonial Mexico©
Exploring Colonial Mexico©
the nave,
facing westA colonial aqueduct runs for almost a mile across the city of Morelia. It was built in the 1780s by Fray Antonio de San Miguel, a Franciscan bishop whose name is commemorated in a broad cobblestone walk known as the Calzada that runs alongside its imposing Roman style arcades. Lined by once fashionable old mansions, the Calzada opens into the tree-shaded Alameda park.
Beside the Alameda, facing a plaza on its south side, stands the church and former convento of San Diego, now known as the Santuario de Guadalupe. Founded in the early 1700s, the church was built in stages through the mid-18th century. When the church was completed, the barefoot Franciscan order of San Diego, familiarly called los dieguiños, added the adjacent convento and hospice.
The church front presents a typical geometrical Morelian profile, its doorway, choir window and sculpture niches linked in an elongated design that thrusts powerfully upwards. Ornamental escutcheons emblazoned with the Franciscan emblems of the Stigmata and the Crossed Arms embellish the facade, and a primitive sculpture of the Virgin of Guadalupe rests in the upper niche surrounded by a relief tapestry of vines and foliage into which more Franciscan insignia are sinuously woven.
Orta's Interior
But San Diego's main attraction is the fantastic interior, which stands in stark contrast to the sober facade. Remodeled in 1915 by Joaquín Orta, the flamboyant Michoacán architect and designer who also redesigned the ornate interior of the Santuario del Carmen in Tlalpujahua, the extravagant Rococo-Moorish interior is by far the most unusual church interior in Morelia, and perhaps all Mexico.
Walls, encrusted columns, multi-lobed archways, ribbed and vaulted ceilings, and the lofty dome vibrate with red, yellow and gilt tilework, glittering ceramics and painted stucco creating densely abstracted floral and foliated patterns that recall the Moorish palaces of Andalusia and north Africa. An extraordinary assemblage of often clashing colors and textures that somehow adds up to a coherent whole.
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