Basilica Cathedral of Lima: for nearly a century, the wrong skeleton lay on display as Francisco Pizarro

On the Plaza Mayor of Lima, the basilica cathedral is the seat of the Catholic archdiocese of Lima. Francisco Pizarro laid the first stone himself and carried the first timber in 1535 for the first church, completed in 1538 and opened on 11 March 1540. With the bull of Pope Paul III of 14 May 1541 the diocese of Lima was erected and the church raised to a cathedral. A second cathedral was opened in 1552 under Governor Cristóbal Vaca de Castro, and the present, third building, begun in 1585 to a design by the architect Francisco Becerra, had its naves consecrated in October 1625. The earthquake of 28 October 1746, one of the most devastating in the history of Lima, brought down both bell towers and much of the nave, and left standing only twenty-five of the city’s roughly three thousand houses. The viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco directed the rebuilding in three phases, between 1755 and 1778, completed in its present form in 1797. The archdiocese of Lima, raised to a metropolitan see on 12 February 1546, is among the oldest in the Americas. The present archbishop is Cardinal Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio, in office since 2019. Francisco Pizarro, murdered on 26 June 1541, is buried in the cathedral. In 1891, for the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death, remains believed to be his were put on public display in a glass coffin, where they stayed for decades. In 1977, during restoration work, workmen found a separate and forgotten crypt holding a lead box inscribed «Here is the skull of the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered and conquered Peru and placed it under the crown of Castile», together with mixed skeletal remains of a woman, two children and an adult man. It was that man, identified by forensic anthropologists from multiple sword wounds to skull and neck consistent with contemporary accounts of his murder, who proved to be the real Pizarro, unlike the remains displayed from 1891, which in fact belonged to someone else. The authenticated remains were laid in the present public crypt in January 1985, four hundred and forty-four years after his death. Pope Francis visited this cathedral on 21 January 2018, praying before the relics of the Peruvian saints and addressing the sixty-eight bishops of the country, then appearing the following day from the cathedral balcony over the Plaza Mayor. According to one source, John Paul II also visited it on his journeys to Peru of 1985 and 1988, though that particular detail has not been cross-checked against a second, independent source. Lima was home to one of only three tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas, set up in 1569 and active from 1570 until 1820, with about forty public autos-da-fé held on the Plaza Mayor in front of the cathedral. The tribunal, however, had its seat in a separate building, near the church of La Merced, and not in the cathedral itself.