March 3, 2020 - 172 - "Thanks for the Daily Dose of Beauty, Zeferino Gutiérrez!!"

A New Park in San Miguel 

     The other day we called our favorite taxi driver, Julio.  He took us out to a local consignment store, La Finca, to search for a rug.  

    Turns out they thought a whole, whole, lot of the their rugs, plus the sizes weren't quite what we wanted, so we gave up on that, but the owner told us about a lot of development out on that edge of town, including a new park.  

Honoring a Man of Vision

     Julio gave us a little tour of the new park on our way home.  It's called Parque Zeferino Gutiérrez. 

          "Where have I heard that name?", I wondered out loud. 
   
          "He's the man who built La Parroquia.", Julio said.

          "Yes, of course!  I love that man!"

     Don Zeferino lived about a hundred years before my time, but I owe him big-time.  


     My visions of San Miguel are all tied up with the beauty he created.  I would even go so far as to say that San Miguel wouldn't be San Miguel if this man hadn't had such an amazing vision.

A Swoon-Inducing Church

     La Parroquia is the centerpiece of San Miguel.  Even after coming here for twenty years, and living here on and off for the past eight years...every time I walk into the square in the center of town and look up to see the spires of the church I still feel as awed as I did the first day I saw it.

     It's different in every light.  The stone goes from creamy pale in the early morning, to pink as the sun hits it, to a vivid bright salmon during the golden hour of late afternoon.  At night it's lit up to enhance it's many spires and bell towers and it takes my breath away equally each time I see it.

Many Visions for La Parroquia

     There's been a church on the site since the early 1500s.  In 1649 the most recent church
was deteriorated to the point that it was virtually leveled and a new one constructed on top.  By 1679, once again the church was torn down and a new one built in the Baroque style.  

Cologne Cathedral, Cologne, Germany

     That's how it stayed for about 200 more years.  During this time cracks developed and in 1880 a man was called in to oversee repairs to the facade of the church.  At that time Zeferino Gutierrez was the city's quarry master.  He was a short, plump, indigenous mason, and he got another vision for the church.

     Zeferino had postcards of several European churches, including Notre Dame, and the cathedral in Cologne, Germany.  With no formal training in architecture, he set about creating his own vision of a European church in the middle of Mexico.

"Now, because Zeferino was self-taught and because he was working with mestizo craftsmen who could neither read nor write, the architect used a stick to draw his designs for the workmen in the red clay soil. This is how I want the tower clock to look, he told them, drawing it in the soil. And this is how the choral windows should be. And so on."

                                     -David Lansing, from "The Story of La Parroquia"

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Zeferino Gutiérrez' vision come true, for all to enjoy.

Don Zeferino with the former mayor of San Miguel,
now serving in the Upper House of Mexican Congress,
Luis Alberto Villarreal Garcia.

View of La Parroquia from the new Zeferino Gutierrez Park.

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"...ultimately that is what architecture is a vision of:  Heaven on earth, at its best."
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-Ben Nicholson