Santa Fe de Bogotá

“ Thus, in 1718, the Viceroyalty of Santa Fé de Bogotá was established, and in 1777 that of Buenos Aires. Neither of these innovations had occurred a day too soon. With the growing population and the increasing political and commercial importance of the Continent, the strained machinery with which it had been attempted to govern all matters from a single centre had broken down and become useless so far as the remoter provinces were concerned. ”

“ Morillo soon had Venezuela under his thumb, and, planting garrisons throughout it, proceeded to lay siege to Cartagena. Capturing this city in four months, he marched unopposed to Santa Fe de Bogota, the capital of New Granada, ruin and devastation marking his progress. In a despatch to Ferdinand, which was intercepted, he wrote: “Every person of either sex who was capable of reading and writing was put to death. By thus cutting off all who were in any way educated, I hoped to effectually arrest the spirit of revolution.” ”

“ To one looking towards the west, from a spur of the mountain at the foot of which Bogotá is situated, as Granada is located at the foot of its hills, the ridge of Suba is seen towards the northwest, just as the sierra of Elvira is seen with respect to the old Moorish capital. And so it is with the relative positions of Santa Fé en la Vega and the pueblo of Fontibon. The illusion is complete, and the similarity between these two famous places in Spain and Colombia must have impressed themselves on the receptive mind of the illustrious conquistador with peculiar force. ”

“ ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO.
“The Alvarado,” on the Santa Fe,
Here oft my eyes have met the break of day;
The red sun rising through the morning mist,
Over the mountains, and the mesa kissed,
Down to the valley, where the shadows deep
Dissolved, and woke the city from its sleep.
Facing the East, the first faint streak of dawn
Sought my closed eyes and ope’d them to the morn.
Then like the passing shadow of a cloud
Revealed the world beneath the lifted shroud,
The glories of the proud Sandia Range,
Whose rugged grandeur God alone can change. ”

“ When peace shall have been firmly established in Colombia, and its finances shall have been placed on a satisfactory basis, the patriotic and far-seeing statesmen of the republic, will, I am convinced, see the necessity of carrying out the plan of the former Archbishop and Viceroy of New Granada—Don Antonio Caballero y Gongora—and connecting Bogotá with Europe by means of the Meta and the Orinoco. It will not be a difficult feat of engineering to build a railroad from the capital to a suitable point on the Meta, and the length of such a road need not exceed one hundred and fifty miles at most. ”

“ Santa Fe, when first visited by the Spaniards in 1542, was a populous Indian pueblo. It has been the capital of New Mexico for nearly two hundred and fifty years. The houses of the ancient town are made of adobe, one story high, and the streets are unpaved, narrow, crooked and ill looking. The inhabitants are of a low order, scarcely entitled to be ranked above the half civilized, though of late years the infusion of western life and rugged civilization has given an impetus and character to the place for which, through three centuries, it waited in vain. ”

“ A party of Spaniards visited the site of Santa Fe in 1542 and found there a large Indian pueblo with a population estimated at 15,000. About 1605, the pueblo being then deserted, the Spanish made a settlement here under the name ‘La Ciudad Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco,’ enslaved the Indians in the neighborhood, and opened up extensive gold and silver mines. ”

“ In Chihuahua, they make a great exhibition with the whole scalps of Indians which they happen to kill by proxy; the refined New Mexicans show but the ears. Among the distinguished buildings in Santa Fe, I have to mention yet two churches with steeples, but of very common construction.
The inhabitants of Santa Fe are a mixed race of Spanish and Indian blood, though the latter prevails. The number of inhabitants was in former times reported as high as 4,000; at present it contains at most 3,000; and with the surrounding settlements belonging to the jurisdiction of Santa Fe, about 6,000. ”

“ So the Spaniards made no further efforts to penetrate northward into a territory which they claimed to be uninhabitable for civilized man. They had made but one settlement—Santa Fe in 1605, which, next to St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest town in the United States. Near Santa Fe, Coronado twice wintered his army on the Rio Grande, in the Province of Tiguex. For eighty-five years the Spaniards possessed Santa Fe, when, in 1690, there was an uprising of the Indians, who captured the town, burned the buildings, and massacred or drove out its inhabitants. ”

“ These several small streams, one of which, the San Francisco, passes through the city, unite near the south-western extremity of the plateau and form the Rio Funza, or Bogotá, which finally plunges over the edge at Tequendama in a beautiful, perpendicular fall of about 475 ft. The city is built upon a sloping plain at the base of two high mountains La Gaudalupe and Monserrate, upon whose crests stand two imposing churches. From a broad avenue on the upper side downward to the west slope the streets, through which run streams of cool, fresh water from the mountains above. ”

“ From the year 1820 many caravans made their way over the trail to Santa Fe, then, as it is to-day, the seat of government. It was here in the old palace that some of the early governors had lived in a semi-royal state, maintaining [Pg 8] a little court and body-guards whose lives were by no means a sinecure, since they were called upon to fight the Indians on many occasions. ”

“ But, great as has been the change that it has undergone during the last few decades, it preserves much of the quaintness of colonial times. Indeed, it is not difficult, in certain parts of the city, to fancy oneself carried back to a typical Spanish town of the time of Charles V or Philip II. As a whole, however, the Bogotá of to-day does not differ materially in appearance from a city of the same size in Spain or [288] Mexico. All Latin-American cities are similar in their leading features, and when you have seen one you have seen all. ”

“ Its forests contain many species of trees of great economic value; among them is the quebracho, which is exported for the tannin which it contains. The capital, Resistencia, with an estimated population of 3500 in 1904, is situated on the Paraná river opposite the city of Corrientes. There is railway communication between Santa Fé and La Sabana, an insignificant timber-cutting village on the southern frontier. In the territory there are still several tribes of uncivilized Indians, who occasionally raid the neighbouring settlements of Santa Fé. ”

“ Bogotá was attacked, from the south, by Benalcazar, the governor of Quito; whilst Ximenes de Quesada, who had disembarked at Santa Marta, marched against it from the north. They did not fail to meet resistance, which, however, was no match for Spanish discipline, arms, and valour; and the above-named leaders had the renown of adding another grand possession to the South-American dominions of their sovereigns. In the course of time the more distant provinces, of which Bogotá was the centre, became subject to its government. ”

“ In 1907 this port was entered by British ships with a tonnage of 80,457, and German with a tonnage of 15,838. Much of the prosperity of Rosario—and its advance is very rapid—is due to its excellent railways. The town has every natural advantage and possesses an industrious and enterprising community which would be one of the most favoured in the world if its government were better.
Santa Fé, the capital of the Province, is a comparatively insignificant town with about thirty thousand inhabitants. It is an old place, dating from 1573, and thus is really [272] more ancient than Buenos Aires. ”

“ Fifteen years later Major W. H. Emory, of the United States army, writes of it as follows:6
The population of Santa Fe is from two to four thousand, and the inhabitants are, it is said, the poorest people of any town in the Province. The houses are mud bricks, in the Spanish style, generally of one story, and built on a square. The interior of the square is an open court, and the principal rooms open into it. They are forbidding in appearance from the outside, but nothing can exceed the comfort and convenience of the interior. The thick walls make them cool in summer and warm in winter. ”

“ Though more in touch with the outside world than Bogotá, it has much the same atmosphere of a world apart, a peaceful, restful little sphere supplied with a few modern conveniences of a crude, break-down-often sort, but with little of the complicated life of twentieth-century cities. It is a splendid place to play at life, to lie fallow and catch up with oneself, with nothing more exciting to stir up existence than the semi-weekly concert in the plaza mayor. A score of carriages rattle over its cobbled streets ”

“ Santa Fé is the third city of Buenos Ayres; it is seated at the confluence of the Salado with the La Plata, about ninety leagues north-west of the metropolis. It is of a square form, surrounded with a wall, and tolerably fortified, to preserve it from the attacks of the Indians, who have pillaged it several times, always massacreing the inhabitants. It contains a church and convent. The environs abound in game, and the soil being fertile produces corn, wine and fruits. It is the channel through which the Paraguay tea is sent to Peru, and is, on that account, of considerable importance. ”

“ In colonial times Bogotá won the reputation, if not the actual position, of “literary capital of South America.” Her speech is still the best Castilian of America, with little of that slovenliness of pronunciation so general from the Rio Grande southward. To this day the city has a considerable intellectual life, wider perhaps than it is deep. “Everyone” writes. He is a rare public man who has not published at least a handful of “versos” in his youth. Poets, writers, painters, and musical composers are more numerous than in many a far larger center of civilization. ”

“ Of them all, the town is evidently most proud of Caldas—a statue of whom adorns the central plaza—the tobacco-chewing savant who discovered how to determine altitude by boiling water—no one who has cooked his eggs in the Andes is long in making 90the same discovery—and who taught the revolted colonials how to make gunpowder—only to be shot in Bogotá for his pains.
So aged is the town that it has not a red roof left; all are faded to a time-dulled maroon. ”

“ Its principal track, however, is a narrow gauge line which runs from Cordoba in a northerly direction to Tucuman, and, with its several branches, serves an extensive territory. A goodly part of the territory traversed is forest land, but a part of it is a salty waste. An independent entrance to Buenos Aires is now being constructed. The lines known as the Provincia de Santa Fé start at Rosario and run north, following the basin of the Paraná River as far as Resistencia, a town opposite to Corrientes, touching at Santa Fé and nearly all the important places in that district. ”

“ The only ones we saw were those of the archbishop and the president of the republic. Indeed, so rough are the streets that most people prefer walking to using cabs, except in cases of necessity.
The first two objects to arrest our attention, as we approached Bogotá from the south, were the chapels of Guadalupe and Monserrate, the former nearly twenty-two [290] hundred feet above the city, and the latter about two hundred feet lower. Perched high upon the flanks of two picturesque mountain peaks, they are conspicuous objects from all parts of the Savanna. ”

“ No other town of its size in America has been the subject of and focus for as much good literature as Santa Fe. Pittsburgh and dozens of other big cities all put together have not inspired one tenth of the imaginative play that Santa Fe has inspired. Some of the transcontinental railroads probably carry as much freight in a day as went over the Santa Fe Trail in all the wagons in all the years they pulled over the Santa Fe Trail. ”

“ Large and prosperous as it has grown, it is not the capital of its province, much to the disgust of its energetic citizens, but is ruled from Santa Fé, a languid little town of several times the age but scarcely one eighth the population of the bustling provincial metropolis. There are advantages in being a capital in the Argentine which we of the north would hardly suspect. ”

“ Bogota` (100) , capital of the United State of Colombia, situated on a remarkable, almost mountain-encircled, plateau, on the river Bogotá, 65 m. SE. of its port, Honda, the highest navigable point of the Magdalena, is 8600 ft. above sea-level, and has a spring-like climate. It is regularly built, with innumerable churches, a mint, university, library, and observatory, and several schools. Though the country is fertile and the mountains rich in coal, iron, salt, and precious metals, its situation and the want of a railway hinder trade. ”

“ Incredible as it may seem, but few Colombians have ever seen the falls of Tequendama. Although the people of Bogotá love to talk about them, as among the greatest wonders of their country, it is rarely that one is found who has actually visited them. And yet they are not more than twelve miles from the capital. Even the peons living on the plains only a few miles from the cataract can give the traveler little or no information as to the best way to reach them. ”