Metropolitan Cathedral: a buried marshal, a poisoned archbishop, an assassinated president — inside one of the first twelve UNESCO sites on Earth

In Quito, in Ecuador, shortly after the founding of the city by Sebastian de Benalcazar in 1534, the first parish priest, Juan Rodriguez, had a modest church of adobe and thatch built on the south side of the future main square. Pope Paul III erected the diocese of Quito on 8 January 1545, naming Garcia Diaz Arias its first bishop. The building of the present stone cathedral began, depending on the academic source, in 1560 or 1562, under the direction of Archdeacon Pedro Rodriguez de Aguayo, with the communal minga labour of canons, Spanish settlers and indigenous residents alike, and the costs divided between the royal treasury, the settlers and the indigenous community. The cathedral was solemnly consecrated on 28 June 1572 by the second bishop, Fray Pedro de la Pena. Gothic-Mudejar in its original structure, with Baroque and neoclassical additions gathered over the centuries, the building first had walls of adobe and wood, later rebuilt in stone, with a coffered ceiling of cedar of Mudejar inspiration and domes clad in green glazed ceramic. Inside is the sculpture of the «Descendimiento de Cristo», known as «la Sabana Santa», the work of the indigenous sculptor Manuel Chili, called Caspicara, not to be confused with his «Assumption of the Virgin», which is kept instead in the church of Saint Francis. A painting by Miguel de Santiago showing the Dormition of the Virgin, made in the 17th century for the choir, was removed during a refurbishment of 1797 and replaced by the Assumption of Manuel de Samaniego, so the work by Santiago does not appear to be on display in the building today. In the cathedral rest the remains of Marshal Antonio Jose de Sucre, hero of South American independence, murdered at Berruecos in 1830. After being hidden and moved several times by his widow to protect them from desecration, his remains were found in 1900 in the convent of Carmen Bajo and taken to the cathedral on 4 June of that year, the seventieth anniversary of his death. They were finally placed, on 25 August 1932, in the mausoleum built for the purpose by the architect Augusto Ridder, with sculptures by Luis Mideros and paintings by Victor Mideros, in a sarcophagus cut from andesite of the Pichincha volcano. On 6 August 1875 President Gabriel Garcia Moreno was attacked near the government palace, on the Plaza Grande, by Faustino Rayo and accomplices, in a political assault fuelled in part by the pamphlet of Juan Montalvo against his re-election. The sources differ on the exact sequence of events, but agree that he was carried dying into the cathedral, where he received the last rites and died soon afterwards. It is not confirmed with certainty that the physical attack took place on the steps of the cathedral itself, as is sometimes told. On 30 March 1877, Good Friday, Archbishop Jose Ignacio Checa y Barba died in convulsions shortly after drinking the consecrated wine during the mass of the presanctified, having noticed its bitterness. The autopsy revealed strychnine poisoning, and nobody was ever tried for it. The diocese was raised to a metropolitan archdiocese on 13 January 1848 by Pope Pius IX; the present archbishop is Monsignor Alfredo Jose Espinoza Mateus, a Salesian, in office since 2019. The building has suffered documented damage in a long series of earthquakes, among them those of 1587, of 1660, linked to the eruption of the Pichincha volcano, of 1755, described as very grave by an academic source based on archive documents but as relatively slight by others, and of 1797, which brought down the towers, with a rebuilding directed by the Baron of Carondelet and the engineer Antonio Garcia, completed in 1807. Later collapses of the bell tower came in 1859 or in 1868, according to conflicting sources, and it was finally rebuilt in 1930 in «Prussian helmet» style; after the earthquake of 1987 the foundations were strengthened with micropiles. In 1978 the historic centre of Quito, of which the cathedral is part by explicit name in the text of the UNESCO inscription itself, was included in the very first group of twelve sites declared World Heritage in the history of UNESCO.