I came to Guatemala with my son, Jay, who is nearly 17. His mediocre Spanish grades drew me to Antigua’s reputation for excellent and inexpensive courses in ‘living’ Spanish. Leaving the Guatemala City airport, we squeezed into a dilapidated ‘chicken bus’ and hurtled through that city’s cinder block outskirts. Soon we crossed a high mountain pass and dropped into a compact valley. Antigua’s fantastic volcanic setting and its skyline of monumental ruins instantly created that magical feeling that we had just passed through the looking glass.
We learned that the highland Maya were routed in the 1520s by the murderous conquistador Don Pedro de Alvarado. For more than 200 years, the city known as Santiago de Guatemala served the Spanish crown as the seat of a vast province. The conquered Mayan population were available to labour on monumental works. The city founders laid out their capital after the grid plan of Seville, itself borrowed from Rome, though they expanded the scale. I heard it said that if Caesar himself walked into a restored Antigueno home today, he could comfortably find his way to the bathroom without noticing
much out of place.
The Spanish built grand palaces, cloistered monasteries, churches, hospitals and universities, in a unique Moorish style dubbed ‘earthquake Baroque’. It is characterised by low rooflines, squat walls and thick, sculpted columns. Antigua lies right on top of a notorious, hair-trigger seismic fault. The most recent disaster was a huge 39-second tremor on 4 February 1976, that killed nearly 30,000 Guatemalans and left more than a million homeless.
After substantially rebuilding their city in 1565, 1586, 1607, 1651, 1689, 1717 and 1751, a damaging ‘swarm’ of quakes in 1773—leading up to a cataclysmic shock on 29 July—pitched the Spanish authorities over the edge. In a series of increasingly harsh edicts, the Crown forced the capital’s reluctant residents to gut their homes and institutions down to the doorknobs. Mules hauled this salvage over the mountain pass to the nearby valley of la Ermita, and a new capital slowly took shape. It became known as ‘Guatemala’ while the abandoned city became simply ‘la Antigua’, or ‘The Old’.
Most of la Antigua’s great public buildings fell into ruin, serving as squatters’ camps and quarries. The Maya returned to build their traditional thatch-roofed huts inside the courtyards of wrecked homes and even in the naves of tumbled down churches. Most of the surviving homes were subdivided into ever-smaller fragments,