And to make sure that it never falls prey to falsehood, a new generation of artists is being created at the Escuela Taller de Quito I, an artisanal school for underprivileged teenagers. Together, apprentices and masters have restored a colonial maternity hospital into the most charming school I’ve ever seen. You can visit between 8am and 4pm and meet tomorrow’s stone carvers, carpenters and restorers, all trained in yesterday’s crafts. Already they are making altar pieces and carved columns so eye-wateringly beautiful that they could easily slip into Quito’s emblematic monastery San Francisco and pass as the real thing.
These kids are the latest graduates of the Quiteno style, the colonial offspring of the gunshot wedding between Spanish Catholicism and indigenous aesthetics. Everywhere you look, you see cupolas, spires, baroque follies, life-like Virgins and Inca suns.
The San Diego cemetery, perched above the town, is a thing of beauty, with its mausoleums and melancholy angels. Inside the spooky 16th-century San Diego convent next door, where nuns scurry in the shadows, I spot the most extreme Christ in a country where gory crucifixions adorn every church and even the odd restaurant. “This is how you love,” says a note that someone has pinned to his feet.
The mystic 17th-century Quiteno artist Miguel de Santiago allegedly killed one of his students to make his shocking sculpture of the dead Christ, and today you can still wonder at it in the San Augustin Monastery, where monks live in seclusion.
But the greatest marvel at the heart of the old town is San Fransisco, the continent’s most extravagant religious center. It has miraculously survived countless earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and only now is it under restoration for the first time.
I climb the scaffolding with the head architect to get baroque vertigo near the gilded, Arab-influenced ceilings and grinning cherubs. “This is the biggest restoration project Quito has seen,” Senor Cheka tells me. “This place was built on the remains of the palace of Atahualpa, and nobody has touched it since. We are digging up skeletons under the church floor. Who knows what else we’ll dig up before we open to the public.” Atahualpa was the last Inca chief, and there is a legend about the gold he left to his protege, Cantuna.
Most likely, the gold is nowhere to be found, because it was used to build San Francisco, just like all the gold the Spaniards found. In return, they gave the indigenous people the promise of salvation, and mirrors that supposedly contained their souls.
This summer, Quito is putting on a big fiesta to celebrate 200 years since South America’s first independence uprising. It ended with bloodshed, but freedom followed. The Spaniards have been long subsumed into the indigenous pool. Old Quito hums with new energies, and the future belongs to the children of Atahualpa.
Quito Bicentenary celebrations are from Aug. 8 to Aug. 10. For more information, visit Corporacion de Tourismo de Quito’s Web site at quito.com.ec.
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