The dream of an order 

By mid XVI century, a conqueror advances through the Amazon jungles. He carries in his bag just a piece of paper with the drawing of a reticule and some handwritten words summarizing the kind of city that Spain would recreate in all of America. This small manuscript is reviewed in The Archives of Indies as: «Sketch of the city or cities that Jerónimo Aguayo intends to found at the Province of the Araucas». The conqueror is just a nomad approaching the Orinoco. But he bears with him the dream of an order. Facing the uncertainty of a huge unknown territory, an ancestral historical formula for the creation of settlements.

Where does this idea of superimposing a perfect reticule on a huge and unknown geography? The procedure reminds another strophe of Woodworth’s on a castaway drawing reticules on the sand:

Huge is the spell
Of these abstractions for a persecuted mind
By images and obsessed with itself

Facing the drama of a New World that he still cannot understand, the conqueror requires abstraction:

In an independent world
Created on pure intelligence.

In this case one is dealing with castaways whose solitary drawings are part of an imperial enterprise trying to populate an entire continent. Spain is going to colonize an entire territory imposing religions, a language, and a same idea of city. From Patagonia to California the same urban scheme that Jerónimo de Aguayo kept in his bag. The idea was to create towns with a comprehensive and uniform recipe to grow and remain.

The King wanted to know

Diego de Losada founds Caracas some 80 years after the Columbus arrival to America in the whole continent there were no more than 30,000 thousand Spanish neighbors. Emperor Philip II, anxious for a description of his overseas domains, in 1577 prepared a questionnaire and orders the provincial governors to forward it to the priests and mayors of the cities, towns and villages of America, and to give prompt answer to some fifty questions. The king wanted to know «if its is flat or rough land, level or mountainous, with many or few rivers, abundant or scarce of fruits and maintenances»; also about volcanoes and caves, coasts and reefs, salt marshes and quarries, herbs and aromatic plants, if there is barley and wine, last, «all the notable things in nature and effects, about the soil, air and sky, worth being known». He was especially interested on the people’s existence and future, and «whatever should be known about the causes of its depopulation».

Among the hundreds of manuscripts and drawings with answers to the questionnaire sent to the Escorial from all corners of America, one finds that of governor Juan de Pimentel: An account of the description of the Province of Caracas, of 1578. He begins by describing the geography of the province, the adventures of Fajardo, Rodríguez Suárez, Losada and the four thousand Indians surviving after «the disquietude of its past wars, the Spaniard participation in their pacification and the work they now have serving them», to which he adds with unease «this is cured as best as possible».

He tells what there is to eat: some avocados that are some sort of «green pears», some fruits called «jobos» looking like yellow plums, guavas like apples full of small seeds, chenette fruit like green nuts and with less pulp than the «jobo» plum, soursops like small melons with spikes as of diamond, calabash trees with which they make bowls, jugs and toppings for their genital member». All seems to be a faulty imitation. Even the fiercest beasts are no more than lions with the size of a mastiff «and not angry, since a little dog makes them climb a tree».

A scratch on a piece of paper

But let us see how was a city having only sixty Spanish neighbors; it is one of the questions asked by the Emperor:

The site and settlement of those villages, is it high or low, or in the plain, with the grid and painted design of the houses and squares and other indicated places of monasteries, as it may be easily sketched on a paper in whish it is stated that part of the village looks noon and North.

The answer is:

This city’s construction has been and is with wood, buried sticks and covered with straw…with walls without any specific height and covered with cane wood tops…since two or three years ago three or four stone, brick and lime with walls covered with tiles houses are being built…

One talks also about a parochial church with two priests and about the monastery of San Francisco, just with «non lasting walls». The sent document includes a 43 x 60 centimeters drawing «scratched» with a pen. It is the first known plan of Caracas. We are facing some incipient set of slum housing of some eleven years, having only not more than three houses with tiles, but, at the same time, it is a prefigured and idealized city in a grid of 25 precise and identical blocks. At this checkerboard one observes its prefigured pieces: the street and the block, the church and the houses, the squares and the courtyards.

On the eastern side of the grid one reads an auspicious rule: «in this way, the entire town is being built.» one of the rules of  games, such as chess, that with simple and finite principles may lead to infinite combinations and reordering.

The double proportionality

Graziano Gasparini pointed one of the most surprising features of this drawing to me through an essay by Walter Palm. Palm shows the relationship between two plans drawn in America by the end of the XVI century and those drawn during the Roman Empire described in the Corpus Agrimensorum topography manual.

There is a feature common to both traditions. Palm calls it «double proportionality» or superposition of two scales: a geographical and a urban one. The plan of Caracas is, according to Palm, the best example of the relationship of the XVI century Spanish American cartography and the Roman surveying systems. In effect, we see in this first drawing of Caracas an evident disproportion between the urban grid’s scale and that of the geography surrounding it. A plan in a city’s checkerboard has been placed on the map of a huge territory. In this sort of map and plan a relationship is proposed between a city and a geography, between a spatial order concept and a profane space not yet having been colonized nor fully known.

Note in the drawing the precise formal expression of our first grid, its uniformity, its symmetry and, observe also the different typologies already being drafted: church, square, house, street. Let us think also about its permanence, since these same blocks are still there and with similar purposes.

We may observe in this drawing the coexistence of the pre-Hispanic organic network suggested by William Niño and the idealized grid imposed by Spain. In the drawing, the reticule has as much importance as the sketches of the Guaire, of the Caruata, Catuche, Anauco and Caurimare brooks and those of the northern and southern mountains. From there on, these watercourses will be another of the chronicles’ constants, while, slowly, they are disappearing under the grid.

Today, as my father observed, the original topography remains, In this plan-map of 1573, there is a small hill close to the Caurimare brook leading to the Guaire: in this promontory, the building where I am now writing this text was located and I may contemplate a good portion of Caracas that grew indifferent to its original drawing.

In these mountains and hill a flowering grass grew called «Caraca». To Pimentel, it is similar to a «matweed» [bledo], a plant as nutritious and abundant yet poorly valued in view of its harshness; hence the expression «me importa un bledo» (I don’t care a matweed). We thus have that, as well as the word Venezuela is a diminutive of Venice, the origin of Caracas is linked to a despised yet profuse grass, as if it were a metaphor and a premonition of our unconscious relationship with nature.

Governor Juan de Pimentel proposes to consolidate this new set of slum housing, the so-called «ranchos» with a province’s capital, that is perhaps why he ordered that the checkerboard be superposed at the map of a territory whose coasts go from the Tucacas Point at the West to the Píritu islands at the East. Even more, on the North there are the islands of Bonaire, Las Aves, Los Roques, La Orchila and La Tortuga.

The First Urban Planner

Diego De Henares was in charge of making the first «Drawings and painted Designs» of houses and squares «scratched on paper». The urban principles engraved here may be found in the Ordinances of Discovery, New Settlements and Pacification decreed by Philip II in the Segovia Woods, published in 1573, which recognizing the rules and instructions the Spanish Crown had decreed on how to relocate and distribute public and private lands over the «orthogonal stretch whose line must be surveyed from the central square». This central square was the main public space, it was given enormous importance and the ruling even specified and distinguished the location, form and dimensions of the square wether the corresponding town was on a shore or deep in-land.

Allan Brewer Carías has analyzed the origins and consequences of these ordinances that a century later would be a part of the renowned «Laws of Indies». Brewer insists on the fact that the populating principle is ratified or confirmed as a royal right, because only with a royal warrant could a new settlement be formed and «always true to the rules and procedures of building a new settlement as ordered by this book». Whosoever founded a town or settlement without authorization was condemnable by death penalty.

The Historian Nectario María retells the words the son of Diego de Henares spoke about his father: «[My Father] was appointed mayor of Caracas and due to his capacities and wits Captain Diego de Losada assigned him to trace and raise the foundations with emphasis on the plaza, streets and yards, which would become his responsibility».

Without a doubt we may consider Diego de Henares as the first architect and urban planner in this Guide of Caracas. Perhaps even the best mayor Caracas has ever had, or at least, the one who, proportionally, has done more work with most lasting consequences for the city.