El Carmen Church Ruins

The market stalls run into a stone façade with two tiers of paired columns: there are twenty-four in all, and the central niche above them is empty. At first, this was the chapel of a brotherhood founded at the city cathedral for services in honor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel; later, a larger church replaced it. The brotherhood took the main image of Our Lady to the church in the new capital, while at the old site the front wall remained without an interior space. The statue in the niche also disappeared after later tremors.

In seventeen seventeen, an earthquake destroyed the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Care of the ruins was entrusted to Manuel de Morga, a local priest and priost—the term for a brotherhood's administrator, responsible for its property and expenses. Morga was to restore the church to the brotherhood and find the money for it.

The brotherhood had been founded at the city cathedral in sixteen thirty-four. Its members wore a scapular—a small cloth sign of devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel—and collected funds for services in her honor. Four years later, they built their own chapel here. The Spanish Carmen came from the name Carmel, and the townspeople came to call the church El Carmen for short.

After the earthquake, Morga decided to build a more spacious structure than the earlier one. While construction was underway, he also commissioned what the church needed to return to ordinary life: as early as seventeen twenty, the master Francisco de León was making a new organ at his request. The work lasted eleven years and cost more than forty thousand pesos.

The church opened in seventeen twenty-eight. During the celebration, an elaborately decorated carriage carrying eight children from noble families was paraded through the city: one portrayed Our Lady, and the others portrayed the seven heavenly princes. Morga founded two more brotherhoods at the new church, but he was able to administer the completed church for less than two years. He died on May thirtieth, seventeen thirty. The bishop, the city council and cathedral council, and many poor people whom the priest had helped attended his funeral. A week later, the School of Christ Brotherhood held a memorial service for him in this church.

Morga's building served for another forty-five years. The earthquakes of seventeen seventy-three made it unusable, and after the capital was moved, the brotherhood took away the altar image of Our Lady: in seventeen eighty, it was installed in the new El Carmen Church in Guatemala City.

In front of the market stands the façade of the very church Morga completed: twenty-four paired columns, twelve on each tier. A separate façade statue of Our Lady remained in the central niche, but the earthquake of nineteen seventy-six knocked it down. Now there is no functioning church behind the columns, and above the market stalls stands empty the niche for which the brotherhood once built its first chapel here.