Andahuaylillas, the Sistine Chapel of America!
Science, art, daring and perhaps also the fruitless task of comparing the incomparable, catches us again when we refer to one of the wonders of our continent, located in the heart of viceregal Peru. We had already addressed this crazy mission in the previous issue of Hilario, when referring to the Joya de Cerén archaeological park, a surprising site located in the Republic of El Salvador.
In this new challenge, we warn you, a fruitless task, we will move forward with two other South American examples that are well worth being part of this chimera. Thus, comparing the Sistine Chapel with the church of Andahuaylillas constitutes a flagrant irreverence towards one and an act of humiliation and injustice towards the other. Understanding that each meadow offers various visual pleasures linked to its habitat and origin, would readers compare the beauty of the gardens of Versailles with that of a field of flax in bloom? Surely not.
The charm of the church of Andahuaylillas - and the enchantment of those who visit it for the first time - is closely related to the geography that surrounds it and its austere and simple exterior, in keeping with the church of a town of no more than six thousand souls, forty kilometers from the city of Cusco, located at an altitude of three thousand one hundred meters. This is how it appears, with its open atrium facing the town square, destined five centuries ago for the evangelization of the locals, with three large wooden crosses as the only relevant element. And inside the temple, the magnificence of an exuberant display of Andean baroque with the side altars covered in gold leaf, as well as the large canvases and murals on the walls, accompanied by a Mudejar-style ceiling, with a colorful regional touch.
The contrast with the surroundings of the Sistine Chapel, located in the heart of the Vatican Palace, is evident, where the visitor enters through majestic corridors with so many works of ancient art that there is not enough time to stop and admire them in detail until reaching that cloister where the conclave of cardinals often decided the destiny of the Christian world.
We find another notable difference in the foundations of the two churches. The Sistine Chapel was built from the partial demolition of the old Capilla Magna, commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV [hence its name], while the church of Andahuaylillas was built in 1610 on an ancient temple that is believed to be Inca or even from an earlier culture.
And finally, we come to the interiors. When Michelangelo, in 1508, was commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint the vault of the Chapel, other great painters had already left their works on the walls; since its inauguration in 1481, Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rossi and Signorelli painted their frescoes. Buonarotti intervened in the vault that until then showed a starry sky in rather ruins, completing those wonderful frescoes in 1512, and only three decades later, another pope, Paul III, managed to get Michelangelo back to paint the world-famous Last Judgement, between 1536 and 1541.
The entrance portal taken from the inside with the murals painted on both sides with the Road to Heaven, and to Hell.
In San Pedro Apóstol de Andahuaylillas, the Parish Priest Juan Pérez Bocanegra commissioned the pictorial works to Luis de Riaño, of Lima origin, painted during the period 1626-1630, who executed murals and canvases of great artistic quality, even painting the two organs [the oldest in Latin America] installed by the famous priest. Turning towards the door to leave the temple, you see two murals flanking it: one represents the Road to Heaven, while the other depicts the Road to Hell.
A significant detail that makes the difference: the descriptive inscriptions of the biblical scenes depicted are executed in Quechua, Aymara and Puquina, in addition to the usual Spanish and Latin.
One in the ecumenical epicenter of Christianity in Europe, was a compendium of art and power; the other, erected on a continent with cultures no less ancient and with other ways of interpreting the spiritual world, an instrument created in pursuit of the evangelization of a people and their conversion to the doctrine of the Church. Both can be described by the same adjective: incomparable.
Piriápolis: The Biarritz of America!
Since ancient times, with no certain date of foundation, a small port and a nearby town inhabited by a community of whale hunters, who at that time were lurking a few miles from the coast, in the Bay of Biscay, were established on the Basque-French coast. Over the centuries, these cetaceans migrated to the open sea and they had to be searched for as far as Newfoundland, so – the hunters who had been there – became fishermen, always working in nearby waters. And so a long time passed without any major changes, until, in 1843, the famous Victor Hugo came to see these beaches, who fell in love with this “white town with red roofs and green shutters set on grassy mounds” as he described it. He was referring to Biarritz. And he predicted that sooner rather than later it would become a fashionable spa, as it did, thanks to the work and grace of Countess Eugenie de Montijo, who became Empress consort of France after her marriage to Napoleon III in 1853.
Eugenia had known Biarritz during her childhood and convinced her husband to spend the summer of 1854 there, where the couple moved with their entire court. Napoleon also succumbed to the charm of its beaches and landscape, and ordered the construction of a small palace to honor his wife. This is how Villa Eugenia received the imperial couple punctually with the arrival of summer, year after year until 1868, and during that period several crowned heads of Europe imitated it with the consequent flow of nobles and aristocrats attracted by the benefits of the climate and its beaches, with the added bonus of feeling included in that select and exclusive social group.
The origin of Piriápolis was different in every way, conceived and created by a single man. Francisco Piria was born in Montevideo in 1847 and was educated in Italy by a paternal uncle, a Jesuit monk, who guided him in his studies of history and philosophy; but if he thought of turning him into a man of letters, he was mistaken. The young man, at sixteen, decided to return to Uruguay with the intention of entering into commercial activity.
What characterized his entire career was an innate genius for promoting his commercial and real estate projects. The city of Montevideo owes him the creation of seventy neighborhoods from subdivisions and auctions of plots at low cost and in affordable installments, over thirty years, for humble families. His auctions were a real party: everyone who wanted was invited to a great barbecue, enlivened by bands, with transportation from the city center. Everything free. And then, at dessert, after the fireworks, Piria appeared behind the auctioneer's desk offering the first lots at a bargain price. At the end of the day, a new neighborhood had been born.
An anecdote fully illustrates his advertising genius: in his beginnings as an entrepreneur, he acquired at an auction, at a very low price, a large batch of thick cloth and decided to put it to use. In his clothing workshop, set up in 1877 on the corner of Treinta y Tres and Rincón streets [in Montevideo], he began to manufacture long coats [he called them “levitones”], and immediately set about developing a strategy to sell them. Once again, his creativity led to a happy ending to this business venture. In the 1870s, there were frequent uprisings by revolutionary groups in the Banda Oriental, coinciding with the arrival in the country of the Remington rifles, a dream weapon that fired six shots per minute. What did our man do? He christened his coats with the name Remington and plastered the city with flyers that invited: “Tomorrow, at such and such address, every oriental man should come and get his Remington.”
Piria himself comments in one of his books that "In 1878 there was a Remington crisis, so I thought that name was more appropriate, and I was not wrong, because the new article made a splash, and in three months the Universal Exhibition [as his ready-made clothing store was called] sold more than five thousand Remingtons."
By the early 1890s, his economic position was already very solid; the land auctions had yielded him substantial profits, enough to allow him to enjoy his fortune at the age of forty-three without worrying about work issues. However, a pleasure trip through Europe once again ignited the founding vocation that accompanied him throughout his life. It happened in Biarritz, and enraptured by its splendor, he conceived of reproducing it on the Uruguayan coast.
This is how Piria describes the birth of his dream city: “I felt all the burning heat of a lover's passion, and from that moment the seaside town arose in my imagination. The countryside was a desert, a collapsed shack as the only population and some fallen fences when I acquired it. Shortly afterward I made the layout of the future Piriápolis, and when the surveyor Alfredo Lerena saw my project he exclaimed: “brother, you are crazy.” A year later, Lerena saw forty thousand one-cubic-meter holes dug in all the streets, boulevards, avenues, and squares. He returned a year later and saw forty thousand trees more than two meters high. [In 1910, the national government awarded him a prize of ten thousand pesos and a gold medal for planting thousands of trees between the Pan de Azúcar hill and the hills later called San Antonio and del Toro. The money was used to build a school, the current Pueblito school.]
On November 5, 1891, he acquired 2,700 blocks of land between the Pan de Azúcar hill and the sea, in the department of Maldonado. His "passion as a lover" was such that he prioritized the purchase of these desert fields, leaving aside the possibility of acquiring land in Punta del Este, or in Buenos Aires, the entire Caballito neighborhood.
In reality, that trip to Europe in 1890 had not been just for pleasure. Piria brought samples of soil from the area and granite from the Pan de Azúcar hill and returned with encouraging results. From there to the purchase in 1891 and the subsequent creation of the Piriápolis Agricultural and Industrial Establishment was only a short step. He commissioned the construction of his private residence to the architect Aquiles Monzoni [current Piria Castle] which was completed in 1897 and during those years he planted 200 hectares of vines, tobacco, olive trees and fruit trees in the vicinity. In 1896 the winery was in full production. With a view to the exploitation of the granite quarries, in 1908 he started his railway with the purchase of two German locomotives from the firm Orenstein & Koppel, for the transport of the extracted raw material to the coast, where the future City of Piria would emerge. Number 1 was christened Fuerza and number 2, Voluntad. Also from Germany came the hoists with a load capacity of 20,000 kilos and from Sweden the hammers driven by 300 horsepower machines, capable of producing 30,000 paving stones per day [Montevideo and Buenos Aires expanded their paving streets with the products produced in these quarries].
He also took care of building a real port that replaced the primitive "Puerto del Inglés", used to transport by steam the granite sheets and paving stones that were supplied to Montevideo, Buenos Aires and other cities on the coast.
In 1904, the Gran Hotel Piriápolis was opened, the work of architect Alfredo Jones Brown. In a display of sumptuousness, the furniture was imported from Italy, as well as the tablecloths; the glassware was of Murano art; the tableware, from Limoges and the carpets from Smyrna. The Casino's gaming rooms were installed there for the first time. As a result of the publicity that Piria took care to develop in Buenos Aires, the first tourists arrived from there along with the families of the Montevideo elite.
Here it is worth reflecting in a paragraph on Piria's iron will to achieve his objectives and overcome difficulties. When the first harvest of tobacco from his plantation took place, he offered the production to the tobacco companies, but they, trying to take advantage of the upstart in the sector, offered him a ridiculous price. And what did he do? He made his own cigars for the consumption of the passengers of his hotel. The same thing happened with the fruit trees, so he went on to make the jams and marmalades that were consumed in the establishment. But the most brilliant thing was his experience with the wine in his winery. Despite the knowledge of oenology that his son Francisco allegedly acquired in France, the wine was downright horrible, so sales were minimal and did not cover the expenses. We do not know how long it took him to find the solution, and he decided to double the bet. With the help of a specialist, he fortified the wine with alcohol and improved its flavour: he had created Cognaquina Piriápolis.
«Cognaquina Piriápolis is a cognac made with the special grapes used to make the most renowned cognacs in Europe. It is a tonic, aperitif and restorative liqueur. A small glass of Cognaquina in a glass of milk taken for five days is more than enough to prove its effectiveness. The weakest stomach person will feel its wonderful effects on the fifth day: those who have lost their appetite, those who suffer from stomach pains, should try a glass of fresh milk with a small glass of Cognaquina for five mornings upon waking up.
You will have noticed, the text comes from an advertising brochure written by our pioneer and as if that were not enough, in others of this nature he spoke – with great elegance and discretion – of the aphrodisiac effects that his wonderful invention had on “weak spirits”, a euphemism to refer to gentlemen with some kind of “sexual laziness”. There were no complaints. Nor is there evidence that this concoction had any positive effect beyond the marketing fever of its alchemist.
Apart from his advertising skill, Piria put all his effort into making his dreams a reality. We referred earlier to his “Piria” railway. The narrow gauge track started from the workshop on the Pan de Azúcar hill and went along the boulevard [finished in 1916] to the port [started in 1910 and finished in 1915], passing by "the Central", a stone construction used as administration and housing for the workers. Even when he needed to transport materials outside this route, he used the resource of making temporary tracks. In this way he went deep into the forest to load the train, and he lifted those tracks when they had already fulfilled that mission.
During the First World War, the coal needed to feed the boilers of the locomotives disappeared from the market, since England consumed the entire production. From his feverish mind came the idea: to make them work with the wood from his forests. And so this comment was born in a chat between countrymen, about the capacity of the Creole horses for rural work, especially for cattle drives: "I once saw, by the hillside, a malacara driving a train." That was how the witness had interpreted it, but the Creole horse fulfilled another much more important function; due to the amount of firewood that the locomotives needed to operate, tongues of fire and waves of sparks appeared from their chimneys that sometimes started fires with the risk of spreading into voracious fires. To control them, Piria had ordered that a countryman on horseback gallop very close to the train and - in case of fire - quickly notify the workshop staff so that they could come and put it out. Get scared? That word did not exist in his dictionary!
Returning to his efforts to develop tourism, he created a trilogy of fountains: the Templete de Venus, a replica of a Greek temple; the El Toro fountain, located at the base of the hill of the same name with a large iron sculpture representing a life-size bull - the work of the sculptor Isidore Bonheur, brought from Paris in 1911 - and the La Virgen fountain, with an image of the Stella Maris, at the foot of the Del Inglés hill, renamed San Antonio, due to the statue of the saint that Piria ordered to be installed in a small oratory raised on the summit, urging single tourists to make a pilgrimage to his altar and request the favors of the aforementioned San Antonio matchmaker.
Inauguration of the Casabó neighborhood, by Piria, on July 18, 1921. Photograph: Piriápolis in images, courtesy of Gaby Zeballos.
Contrary to the predictions, a few years after its inauguration, the Piriápolis Hotel was insufficient for the tourist demand and since the handful of hotels that emerged parallel to the coast did not meet the expectations of passengers accustomed to the luxury offered by Piria's establishment, the time had come to undertake another grandiose enterprise: in 1920, the President of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, Mr. Baltasar Brum, laid the foundation stone of the Argentino Hotel. We must bear in mind that this recognition of his work occurred in a very special context, given that Piria was openly opposed to the government.
His successful progress was unstoppable. Argentines, attracted by his publicity, came as tourists and investors. Years before - in 1912 - he had subdivided the coastal area and put the lots up for sale with great acceptance from this public from the first auction.
Ten years later, the largest hotel in South America was inaugurated, the work of the French architect Pedro Ghichot; a six-story building, 120 meters wide by 70 meters deep, with capacity to receive 1,200 guests. Located next to the sea – with the 7 km walled, paved and tree-lined promenade –, this icon of Piriápolis had a large bakery, a 2,000 m2 kitchen, which included an ice cream factory, a rotisserie, forty ovens, forty burners and two cold rooms with capacity for all the products that made up the establishment's full-board menu. On the ground floor was the hydroelectric power plant, the billiard room, the hair salon, the gym and the hot and cold baths with sea water.
The dishes came from Bavaria, the glassware from Czechoslovakia, the linen sheets and tablecloths from Italy, and the furniture from Austria.
The graphic material displayed in the Piria Castle [now the Museum] refers to Piria's vision of the future, having imported a sufficient quantity of replacement tableware and spare parts for the power plant and the pumps that pumped seawater to the baths "for a hundred years."
When the Argentino Hotel was inaugurated, the Piriápolis train had already been passing in front of it for several years, bringing passengers who had transferred from the line that ran from Montevideo. There was also Piria's drive to extend the route that initially ended at the workshop on the hill, and which, as a result of his tenacity, was extended to the Pan de Azúcar station, with a first trip in January 1915.
An old photographic record that shows us the strength of the resort in its early years. Photograph: Piriápolis in images, courtesy of Gaby Zeballos.
Turning the wasteland into an orchard was his feat. Let us list other milestones that introduce us to the great dreamer:
- The arrival of the Mihanovich company bringing Argentine tourists to spend a weekend on the luxurious Vapores de la Carrera, the Ciudad de Buenos Aires and the Ciudad de Montevideo, both propeller-powered, and also using the older paddle-powered steamers Helios and Paris.
- The construction of the Church [never consecrated due to Piria's confrontation with the Clergy]
- The creation of the Hippodrome in Punta Fría.
- The Pabellón de las Rosas for popular shows, inaugurated in 1933.
- The hotels that flourished, many of them with financial help from Francisco Piria.
- And even the family chalets, Les Mouettes [The Seagulls], by Lorenzo Piria [1904], today an Art Museum; the current Hotel Colón, by Alfredo Piria [1910], bought in 1921 by the Anchorena family, and Villa Adelina, by Francisco Pancho Piria.
Francisco Piria, that great pioneer, died on December 10, 1933, at the age of 85, and control of everything was left in the hands of the family, displacing Carlos Bonavita, then general manager and right-hand man of Don Francisco.
Panchito Piria was the one who took over; he was the only one of the children who had a university degree. He had returned from Paris as an oenologist and chemical engineer, although it was known that he had no interest in studies and much less in work. The new scenario under his leadership augured the worst; His failure in the wine project, his fondness for partying and his cowboy ways [his father commented that he had been thrown out of several boarding houses for killing flies with bullets] promised the worst, and it happened: the confrontation with Bonavita, also handsome with a revolver.
On January 21, 1934 – not even two months had passed since the founder's death – a fire caused by sparks from the train took hold in Piriápolis. Pancho and Bonavita met in the workshops where the firefight was being organized. They had been eager for each other for a long time. After mutual recriminations, in a duel worthy of a western, the workers heard the shots. With tragedy written on his face, Carlos Bonavita climbed into his Chevrolet and drove madly to the Piriápolis Hotel, got out leaving the car running, ran in and shouted: I killed Pancho! He passed by the bar, with the '38 in his right hand, he finished a glass of whiskey and ran to room 41, where he was staying. He locked the door before giving time to those who ran after him, foreseeing the outcome, and immediately the shot was heard with which Bonavita took his own life.
The projects and undertakings were left adrift and the inability of the successors led Piriápolis to a decline that only in the current century is seeing a revival of its glory.
Piriápolis. The charm of the coast and its terraced constructions. Photography Manuel Gayoso, via Flickr.
We believe that our readers will know how to interpret us when we say that Piriápolis, born in the mind of Francisco Piria and shaped by the cyclopean force of his will, is unique and incomparable.
«In all my undertakings I conceive, encompass, mentally execute, and logically proceed like someone who solves an algebra operation: I solve my operations and I never make a mistake. My guide is my criterion.
I do not belong to the race of those who slack off, not even those who stop, because to stop in the course of a work is to fall behind.»
Signed: Francisco Piria [1847 – 1933]
* Special for Hilario.
Bibliography consulted:
Luis Martínez Cherro, Por los Tiempos de Francisco Piria. Ed. De la Banda Oriental, Montevideo. Uruguay, 1992.
Pablo Reborido, Piriápolis. Una Historia en 100 Fotos. Ed. De la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, Uruguay, 2009.