Keywords
Colonial architecture
Jesuitic cloister in Cartagena
How to Cite
Abstract
Among the great number of ancient monuments located In Cartagena de Indias - Colombia - the Cloister of San Pedro Claver has an outstanding historic value. The Jesuitic complex consists of two buildings: the XVIIth century cloister, owned by The Company during the colonial period; and the temple built fifty years later, bearing today the advocation of the Saint Guardian of the Slaves. The Jesuits first came to the city in 1604, to found a school. Cartagena was an important trading port in between Europe and the New World, where the fleet from Spain and the slave ships arrived regularly. The city had hospitals and churches but not an educational establishment. The Jesuit Community first made a church as well as a convent and a school in some terrain donated by the authorities. Military engineers worked in and around the City, during the same period designing and building walls and fortresses around the port of these walls invaded the Jesuit property, so problems arose between priests and engineers. Finally, the school was superimposed on the top of the defensive wall but, the King ordered the destruction of the building, which was never carried out. More than thirty years later a wise solution was reached: a second wall was built in front of the earlier one. This was the work place for San Pedro Claver. In time the school suffered many transformations, reforms and had different owners. In 1767 Jesuits were exiled from Spain - as well as from all the same happened in each colonial site, they had settled down in - then, the school was converted into a hospital in charge of the Hospital community Brotherhood of San Juan de Dios. In 1861, Dictator Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera expelled the Brotherhood from its cloister and the church, using both as a military establisment. In 1884, Bishop Eugenio Biffi took the school back and in 1896, he returned the building to the Jesuit Community. Since 1896 The Company honors the memory of the Apostle of the slaves, To do so, it has started the restoration of the monument to achieve a pleasant site where memory of San Pedro Claver´s work on behalf at the African slaves can be preserved, for this task. The help of Javeriana University in Bogotá and its Institute Carlos Arbeláez Camacho from the school of Architecture and Design has been invaluable, studies toward this goal having started ten years ago and being now complete, as well as an Integral project for its restoration. The challenge now is to bring to fruition this architectural work.Apuntes is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
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