Oaxaca Cathedral: begun in 1535, consecrated in 1733 — green cantera built low and thick against the earthquakes

The metropolitan cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption faces the north side of the Zócalo of Oaxaca de Juárez, beside the Alameda de León. Its chronology needs care, because the official sources distinguish two buildings. Construction began around 1535, when Antequera became a bishop’s seat, with a first fabric of three naves roofed in straw. The building seen today, however, is in substance the reconstruction entrusted in 1724 to Miguel de Sanabria — the only architect the sources name with certainty — and finished in 1733, after the earthquakes so frequent here had compromised the earlier fabric. The most damaging tremor is put by the Centro Virtual Cervantes in 1714. The consecration took place in 1733 at the hands of Bishop Francisco de Santiago y Calderón: some sources give 12 July, but the exact day has no institutional confirmation, and here we stop at the year. The main front, completed around 1752, is in green cantera — the local volcanic stone that the INAH names as a distinguishing feature of the city — with three Baroque storeys, three arched doorways and, in the central bay, the carved relief of the Assumption of Mary. As the official record of the Sistema de Información Cultural notes, the building is deliberately low, massive and thick-walled, like the other churches of the city: an anti-seismic strategy that the UNESCO description of the site extends to the whole of Oaxacan architecture. The earthquake of 14 January 1931, the most devastating in the city’s history, left the bell towers on the point of collapse — so the local chronicles describe them. Some English-language sources speak of towers «destroyed», but that version finds no support in the accounts consulted, and the present low towers are in any case the result of twentieth-century redesigns. Inside are the Baroque organ of 1711-1712 by Matías de Chávez of Puebla — according to the Instituto de Órganos Históricos de Oaxaca the oldest securely dated organ in the state, restored in 1996-97 and still in use at the Baroque pitch of 392 Hz — the chapel of the Señor del Rayo, an image venerated as miraculous, and the relics of the Cross of Huatulco. On the high altar stands a bronze statue of the Virgin of the Assumption cast in Italy: the sculptor’s name varies between sources and is not asserted here. A clock in the south wing is traditionally said to be a gift of Ferdinand VII of Spain, but the report has no institutional confirmation. The cathedral is not inscribed by UNESCO on its own: it is one of the monuments that guard the Zócalo of the Historic Centre of Oaxaca, inscribed in 1987 together with the archaeological zone of Monte Albán under criteria (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv).