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Updated: June 11, 2025
City streets, blank-walled houses, patios, the rattle of the hoofs of burros over cobbles, the shuffle of human feet, the toll of bells from a convent tower. Gay little bits of music, laughter, flashing eyes, a voluptuous love song repeated over and over. A sudden wild outbreak, fighting men, shots, the clash of steel again a tolling bell and a requiem for the dead. A horse galloping in the night.
We entered the city by a handsome gateway, and immediately found ourselves in a long street, with low, mean, ruinous houses on either side. The houses had porches in front, and patios or court-yards. The shops were small, with their goods placed on tables at the doors; there was no glass to the windows, and no display of articles of commerce.
On the main thoroughfare leading from the Plaza Mayor to the alameda are several grand private residences, having the most beautiful courts, or patios, as they are called, that the imagination can conceive, lovely with tropical trees and flowers in vivid colors, and rendered musical by the singing of caged birds.
The dome of the seventeenth-century Renaissance cathedral accustomed for five or six generations to look down on low, one-storied Spanish dwellings surrounding patios almost Moorish in their privacy, seemed to lift itself in some astonishment over warehouses and flour-mills; while the mingling of its sweet old bells with the creaking of cranes and the shrieks of steam was like that chorus of the centuries in which there can be no blending of the tones.
The stunted bush and the sand fringed the very walls. It had the country to itself, and there was nothing but itself which could spoil that country. It was cool and airy and oddly quiet. Inside, tiles and open patios and big panelled rooms gave all that could be desired: outside, there was an impression of simplicity and freedom.
That is, if you leave out of the count the irregular, to and fro, up and down, narrow lanes, passing the blank walls of low houses, and glimpsing leafy and flowery patios through open gates, and suddenly expanding into broader streets and unexpected plazas, with shops and cafes and churches in them.
It is a pretty place, and remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with a minority of industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who live in agreeable little houses, with patios open to the passer, and with balconies overhanging him.
A narrow, shaded street tempts us to leave the noisy, business part of the town and the throng that crowds these streets and plazas, and stray into the suburbs. No matter which way we turn, some new picture meets our eyes. Wandering along, we peep into doorways, courtyards and pleasant patios.
There are over twenty of these courts within the grounds, from which broad, high corridors open, which traverse the several departments of the institution. Mangoes, oranges, and bananas thrive on the trees in these patios, and such an abundance of red and white roses, in such mammoth sizes, we have rarely seen.
About half the houses are two stories in height, the others one story; but all are flat-roofed and without chimneys. The main or upper story has iron balconies which project over the narrow streets and darken them. The houses have no windows of glass, but the window openings are provided with heavy shutters. We enter these houses through interior courts or patios.
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