La Ermita Church

Two bell towers and locked doors face the atrium of the old La Ermita, the former parish church of Santísima Cruz de Barranco. A pointed wooden vault once covered its main space, and a small cemetery was laid out beside it. After the earthquakes, services moved to the new church by Barranco Municipal Park; the old church is now being prepared for full restoration.

According to local legend, fishermen from San José de Surco once saw a light above the ravine, climbed toward it, and found an image of the Crucifixion here. Later, a baker from Lima named Caicedo credited this image with the recovery of his seriously ill wife. He earned his living selling bread in the city neighborhood of Carmen, and in gratitude he built a small chapel of adobe and quincha—a wooden frame filled with reeds and clay—at the edge of the ravine.

That is where the two names come from. The church was dedicated to the Holy Cross described in the legend. In everyday use, “La Ermita”—a secluded chapel—took hold. Fishermen, travelers, and pilgrims came to it, and people gradually began settling nearby. Caicedo died without seeing the larger church, but the chapel had already determined where the future Barranco would grow.

The present façade came after another chapter. The bust beside the church depicts Manuel Andrés de la Fuente Chávez, the chaplain responsible for services here. He expanded the chapel, rebuilt the sacristy roof, and enclosed the small cemetery. On January fourteenth, eighteen eighty-one, during the War of the Pacific, Chilean soldiers who entered Barranco looted the church and set it on fire. De la Fuente lost both his place of service and the building he had managed to improve.

As early as eighteen eighty-two, the chaplain began rebuilding. Barranco residents provided the money; part of the funds came from Patricio Lynch, one of the senior Chilean commanders. De la Fuente accepted the donation from an officer of the army whose soldiers had burned the church, and continued construction.

In nineteen oh one, builders turned the church toward the present atrium, erected a pointed wooden vault, and built two bell towers. That same year, De la Fuente asked the archbishop to separate the local community from the parishes of San José de Surco and Chorrillos. Two years later, the request was granted, and the chaplain himself was appointed the first pastor of the parish of Santísima Cruz de Barranco. He served here until his death in nineteen thirteen.

After the earthquake of nineteen forty, parishioners built a new church by Barranco Municipal Park. The earthquake of nineteen seventy-four brought down the roof of the old La Ermita, and it was closed. In the summer of twenty twenty-six, services are still held in the new church, the old one is being prepared for full restoration, and beside its locked doors remains De la Fuente’s bust, inscribed: first pastor of the parish of Santísima Cruz de Barranco.