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Updated: May 10, 2025
Nor is this all. At Vigia, immediately opposite to Souré, on the continental side of the Pará River, just where it meets the sea, we have the counterpart of this submerged forest. Another peat-bog, with the stumps of innumerable trees standing in it, and encroached upon in the same way by tidal sand, is exposed here also.
Immediately behind it stands a hill with an elevation of about nine hundred feet above sea-level. Its name indicates the reason for its application, La Vigia, the "lookout," or the "watch-tower." From its summit, we may assume that the people of earlier times scanned the horizon for any sign of approaching pirates by whom they might be attacked.
It is remarkable for its regularity of outline and the narrowness of its apex. On this apex, a mere sugar-loaf crown, are a vigia or look-out station, and a signal-staff, whence the approach of vessels is telegraphed to the port of La Union, at the base of the volcano.
These are: The Torreon de Vigia, a martello tower placed on the inlet of San Lazaro opposite La Reina. The old fort called La Fuerza, built three hundred and fifty years ago, near the present Plaza de Armas, and now used for barracks and public offices.
On the right hand a hill overhangs the town, rising precipitously to the height of a thousand feet or thereabouts, on the extreme pinnacle of which is erected a signal station, called the Vigia, which, at the instant I saw it, was telegraphing to some craft out at sea.
But I am not going to work up the old man of the vigia; for he was of little consequence on the 10th day of April, 1853, except as a wondering spectator on the top of Conchagua, in a group consisting of an ex-minister of the United States, an officer of the American navy, and an artist from the good city of New York, to whose ready pencil a grateful country owes many of the illustrations of tropical scenery which have of late years lent their interest to popular periodicals and books of adventure.
After loosening several large stones from the side of the cone, and watching them bound down the steep declivity, dashing the scoriae like spray before them, and bearing down the dwarf trees in their path like grass beneath the mower's scythe, until they rumbled away with many a crash in the depths of the forest at the base of the mountain, and after making over to the grateful old man of the vigia the remnants of Dona Maria's profusion in the shape of sandwiches and cold chicken, we commenced our descent, taking the shorter path by which I had descended three years before.
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