Durango Cathedral: three generations of baroque on the Camino Real, and the legend of the nun on the tower

The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception presides over the Plaza de Armas of Victoria de Durango, on Avenida 20 de Noviembre. Its building history is a succession of fresh starts. A first parish church of the Assumption dates from 1563, the first year of Governor Francisco de Ibarra. Then came its destruction: by a fire on the eve of Corpus Christi in 1634, according to the prevailing account of the diocese and the civic portal, or by a collapse as early as 1620 according to the INAH catalogue, a divergence recorded here without resolving it. A second building of 1635 was ruined by damp and demolished. Finally the present fabric took shape from about 1695 under Mateo Núñez, whom the sources name in agreement, though with a cautious «hacia», and it never knew a single finishing line: partly completed in 1713, its baroque façades finished between 1760 and 1765 according to INAH, and formally declared complete in its furnishings only in 1844. The official entry of the Sistema de Información Cultural reads «three phases of Novohispanic baroque» in its portals: Solomonic columns and, on the side façades, a plant decoration that, as México Desconocido puts it, «spills over the whole cantera». An episcopal seat since the erection of the diocese of Nueva Vizcaya, decreed by Paul V on 11 October 1620 at the request of Philip III, and an archdiocese since 1891, the church is a minor basilica: the GCatholic register dates the decree to 8 February 1957, a date reported here with its source, as it is not confirmed by official Mexican acts. The interior, three naves flanked by rows of side chapels, preserves the early eighteenth-century choir stalls in carved, estofado and polychrome mahogany, with 25 upper and 18 lower seats; an underground crypt for the burial of bishops and canons, documented by the regional press; and the Galería Episcopal, a museum of sacred art that the official sources of the diocesan network say holds over 500 pieces of the 17th-18th centuries in eight rooms. The historic centre of Durango, 142 blocks declared a monuments zone in 1982 and for UNESCO «the largest concentration of historic monuments in northern Mexico», a judgement that refers to the centre and not to the cathedral alone, has been a component of the UNESCO serial site Camino Real de Tierra Adentro since 1 August 2010. The cathedral is its monumental focus, without being a component in its own right. There remains the legend, and it should be told as such: that of the nun Beatriz who, at the time of the French intervention, climbed the tower every night to wait for a soldier who never returned. The city chronicler tells it, the archdiocese has no trace of her, and the nun-shaped shadow that appears on the tower at night is, as El Universal explains, an effect of the night lighting, best observed from the pedestrian Calle Constitución on full-moon nights.