The 1773 Earthquake in Antigua Guatemala: The Quakes That Ended a Capital

To understand what broke in 1773 you have to picture what stood there. This was the capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala, the seat of government for a vast captaincy general stretching across Central America. It was a city of convents, churches and royal houses two and a half centuries old by then, laid out on a grid and sitting between three volcanoes on ground that had never been still.

It had been shaken before. The 1717 earthquakes damaged San Francisco, and the San Casimiro earthquake of 1751 hit the city again, which answered by building itself a new City Hall. The warnings were on record.

The city built on anyway.

The event itself the sources this site verifies handle with care. They call the sequence the Santa Marta earthquakes of 1773, and they record its effect rather than its hours. The cathedral was seriously damaged.

The great convents were abandoned. The decision was taken to abandon the site altogether. That is the shape of it, and this page will not pad it out, because no verified source on this site gives a month, a day or a shock count for the sequence.

The name Santa Marta is what the record carries, and the record stops there.

The aftermath matters more than the shaking, because the aftermath is what you photograph. The capital moved away. The cathedral's own record gives 1779-1780 for the removal, which means the decision took years to carry out, and popular tellings that compress the quake and the move into a single year are skipping that gap.

The city declined into a market town, and that decline is precisely why the grid survives. Nobody built over the ruins. The plaza kept its 1737 fountain by Diego de Porres, the royal facades kept their long lines, and the broken churches kept their broken naves.

What reads today as a preserved colonial capital is, in a real sense, the wreckage of one that nobody got around to replacing.

The cathedral

The Santa Marta earthquakes seriously damaged the great church that had been rebuilt between 1669 and 1680 and elevated to a Metropolitan cathedral in 1743. In 1804 the parish of El Senor San Jose was created out of the ruins, and that arrangement is still what you see. The working parish occupies the rebuilt section, the rest stands open to the sky.

The ruins keep a crypt and passages whose usefulness is unknown, which is the record's own phrase, and the record leaves it there. Later shakes kept taking bites. The 1874 earthquake cost the parish its bell towers and the 1976 earthquake damaged the facade.

The conquistador Pedro de Alvarado was reinterred in his niche in the cathedral in December 2007. The full history of the block is on the cathedral page.

San Francisco and the pilgrim church

San Francisco's current church was built by Diego de Porres and inaugurated in 1702 on a 16th-century fabric, and it was damaged in 1717 and 1751 before the 1773 earthquakes partly destroyed it. The 20th century added its own damage in 1917 and 1976. The ruins section stood unrestored until 1967, while the 1702 church carried on beside it, which is why the site reads as two buildings in one.

Today the shrine of Santo Hermano Pedro, beatified in 1980 and canonized in 2002, draws thousands of pilgrims a year, so the church that broke in 1773 is now one of the busiest rooms in the city. It is covered in the city list.

The emptied convents

Capuchinas was the last convent built in the city, started in 1731 with its church consecrated in 1736 under Diego de Porres's supervision. It was damaged in 1751 and again in 1773, and after 1773 it was abandoned by order of the Captain General. Its most photographed feature is the circular courtyard, cells built in a ring around a central common chamber with underground passages, described by a visiting prince, Wilhelm of Sweden, in 1920.

The convent is owned today by the conservation authority CNPAG and access is paid, but no official fee amount is published online, so this site prints none. Read the full entry in the city list.

Santa Clara, and the honest gap

Santa Clara stands listed among the city's ruins on INGUAT's official Antigua page, and that is nearly the whole of the verifiable record. No official practical data exists for it at all, no fee, no hours, no closed days, because no official page is reachable. That is an honest gap, and this site prints it rather than filling it.

The pattern is worth noticing. The 1773 earthquakes emptied the convents, the capital's departure kept them empty, and two and a half centuries later the checked record for several of them is one line long.

Start with the fountain, because it is the smallest dispute and the clearest example. The checked sources give 1737 for Diego de Porres's mermaid fountain in the plaza. The year 1740 circulates widely in guidebooks, and it is not confirmed by any source this site could verify, so this page prints 1737 and notes the dispute.

The fountain's exact day is unknown too. When a number is that cheap to print wrong, it is worth being the one site that prints it right, and the fountain itself still stands for you to check against the plaque in Parque Central.

The bigger simplification concerns the move. The earthquake is 1773. The capital's removal is 1779-1780, and that span comes from the cathedral's own record.

Compressing the two into one event is the most common error in popular tellings of the 1773 earthquake in Antigua Guatemala, so it is worth naming plainly. The destruction was the cause. The move was a decision, and decisions of state take years, which is exactly what the record shows.

If you read that the capital fled in 1773, you are reading a story that skipped the six-year gap, and the full sequence is laid out on the cathedral page.

Then there is the honest negative, which is the one that surprises people most. No verified death toll exists in the sources this site verifies. No shock count either, and no building-loss figure.

Popular totals for the Santa Marta earthquakes circulate freely, and none of them carries a verifiable origin, so none is printed here. That is not evasiveness, it is the correct treatment of an event this old with sources this thin, and it applies to the whole story told on this page. Where the record ends, the record ends.

Plan the rest of your visit with the planning guide and treat everything else you read about the quake's numbers with the same suspicion this page applies to its own.

The ruin walk the quakes wrote for you fits inside the grid. Start at the cathedral on the park, where the working parish of El Senor San Jose sits against the ruined nave and the broken section stands open to the sky. Cross to the park itself and stand at the 1737 mermaid fountain with the long facade of the royal houses behind it, the complex begun in 1558 that held the treasury, the jail and the Hall of Arms.

Walk two blocks north to the arch, the convent crossing built from 1693 so cloistered nuns could cross the street unseen.

From the arch, continue to San Francisco, where the 1702 church still works and the ruins section beside it stayed unrestored until 1967. Finish at the La Merced complex, the building finished in 1767 that survived Santa Marta practically unscathed because it was practically new. It is still open for worship, and its story is on the La Merced page.

The whole loop is an afternoon's walk at an easy pace inside the grid, and the city list carries each stop with its hours where hours are published.

One honest practical line before you set out. Several ruin-site entry fees are simply not stated online. Capuchinas charges an admission whose amount no official page publishes, and for the cathedral ruins and Santa Clara the record does not even settle whether a fee is asked, so carry cash and expect to settle it at the door.

If you would rather hear the whole story in order without reading this page on your phone in the sun, the walking tour card is the lazy way to do it. You can find it among the tours.