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| the stones and bricks used to build the aqueduct built by the Spanish in the mid-1700s to bring water from a spring in San Felipe (del Agua; now a suburb of the city) through Xochimilco and into the center of the city. The acqueduct replaced a ditch that was dug in the 1500s The stone aqueduct was in operation until 1941. |
Photos and ramblings of architecture/architectural details post 1 of whothehellknowsbutMANY.
The historical centro of Oaxaca de Juárez is colonial -- that is, the Spanish built it post-conquest. There wasn't really a city here, but there were Zapotec and Mixtec settlements nearby (including Jalatlaco and Xochimilco which are both now barrios immediately adjacent to the centro historico but certainly well within the city) and a fort built by the previous conquerors (the Mexica empire) at the base of the hill known as the Cerro del Fortín. The first Spaniards arrived to create a village in 1521. The subsequent history of the city (just a village at that point) is quite complicated with the Spanish founders of the city wanting autonomy/relative independence and Hernán Cortés not being happy with that, multiple appeals to the Spanish Crown and the Crown siding with the founders and Cortés ignoring that (big surprise, no?), forcibly expelling people and/or taxing them heavily because he managed to get himself appointed Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca. The the people petitioned the Crown again and the Crown elevated the village to a "city" which gave it rights, etc. etc. That was in 1532. Suffice it to say, many of the buildings hail from the colonial history- although many of the original buildings, especially the churches, were destroyed by the earthquakes that are endemic here. They figured out how to build eventually though!
Many of the buildings- especially the more formal ones and certainly the churches-- use the native greenish stone. In fact, Oaxaca's nickname is la Verde Antequera (a tribute to the original name: Nueva Antequera and to the green stone). Here is a quite fancy casa that shows off the greenish stone:
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| Quite baroque-ish building with the green stone bricks (the stone is "cantera" - a volcanic ash and dust-formed stone that picks up color from mineral impurities of the region) |
Here you can see how thick some of these green cantera stone walls are-- this is from an ex-convento (now a hotel):
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| Window & window well in an exterior wall of the ex-convento Santa Catalina de Siena, now the Hotel Quinta Real (built between the end of the 16th century and the 18th century) |
Green cantera stone is also used in construction for other than houses-- streets, plazas, sidewalks, wherever and anywhere. Here's some blocks that form a kind of bench at the edge of an accessible ramp in a plaza in the centro. I love all the variation in color and texture- so subtle and beautiful, the more you look at it, the more you see,
Often thin red bricks are interspersed with the green cantera stone blocks, as you can see here part of an archway in brick or as above with the bricks in between the stones,
Here's more of that sort of thing with a fuller view of the old aqueduct:
In that nicho at the far right of this foto, in case you are curious? An altar. Por supuesto!
Speaking of bricks, sometimes brick is indeed used to build houses. This is very odd to me in a place that has lots of earthquakes. In California we never had brick buildings because they would fall down in an earthquake. Well here, wood is at too high a premium for building (and this is also why if there is an earthquake siren or an earthquake you run out of your house or building). In the following fotos, you can see bricks, and various other materials as well. The first foto also features one of the ways of building a roof- overlapping clay tiles. The second foto features cantera stone blocks and bricks.
I'm always interested to see the way the really thin bricks are used to form arches in decorative aspects of a roofline, as in following two fotos, each showing a slightly different design:
Notice that above the brick arches in the second foto are what the actual roof is made of: corrugated iron sheets (called "lamina"). This is a very common roof material. At a favorite restaurant of ours (Ancestral Cocina Tradicional) the roof over the kitchen/comal area is made of corrugated iron lamina that is painted to look like terracotta clay:
(The dining room of the restaurant, by the way, is entirely open-air. Mostly it's a big patio with a lot of trees and plants and landscaping; there is a small part that is under a roof covering but open on three sides with the ancient aqueduct forming the back wall. This is a very Xochimilco-type arrangement for a restaurant.)
For contrast here is an actual terracotta tile roof, with a wonderful amount of patina:
Finally, for this edition of building materials and architectural venacular design we have all the houses that are stucco-ed over, like the houses in the following fotos. The only rule here is that usually they are painted some intense color. Sometimes they are just white (like our house) in which case they are often covered in some vine or other (like our house, jajaja!). But most often they are orange or dark blue or yellow or dark red, or green, or sky blue or dark pink or a lighter pink or magenta or purple ...or any number of colors. Very often the trim will be in a different, contrasting color (I have heard that in the centro historico the government dictates what colors your house can be painted; this does not seem to be stifling creativity though). Sometimes there will be a different color painted on a lower part of the house. Sometimes there is a combination of exposed stone/brick and painted stucco.
Oddly enough, even with these houses, there are sometimes (intentional, I can only imagine) peeks into what lies beneath the stucco and paint. Here's an example with brick exposed in parts of the walls of these fairly formal houses/palacios,
That's it for now! As if that wasn't long enough?!
