What an Artisan Quarter Preserves: San Blas and the Long Craft Lineage of Cusco

Walk up the Cuesta de San Blas from the Plaza de Armas. The climb is steep enough that you will feel the altitude. The cobblestones underfoot are colonial; some of them are reused Inca paving. The stone walls on either side are mostly Inca up to about head height, then colonial above. About halfway up, there is a small workshop with a wooden door. Inside, a man is sitting at a workbench shaping a small wooden saint with a chisel. He is the third generation in his family to work in this room. His grandfather worked beside Hilario Mendívil. His father took over the workshop in the 1970s. He is teaching his daughter to carve.

That workshop, multiplied by a few dozen, is what San Blas is.

What the quarter has been

San Blas occupies the hillside immediately northeast of the historic center, climbing from the Plaza de Armas up to the slopes below Sacsayhuaman. Before the Spanish conquest, the area was called Tococachi, "the place where salt is found," and was associated with one of the lesser royal lineages of Cusco. It is not clear from the surviving archaeological record exactly what kinds of production happened here in the imperial Inca period, but the area was densely inhabited, the streets were laid out on the steep grid that still organizes the quarter today, and many of the foundation walls of the colonial mansions on these streets are recognizably Inca.

The Spanish refounded the area as a barrio in the 1540s and built a parish church on what was probably an indigenous huaca, a sacred site. The first church burned, and the present Church of San Blas was completed around 1562. From the beginning of the colonial period, the quarter was associated with artisan production. The colonial administration housed indigenous and mestizo craftsmen in San Blas in part because the steep streets were unattractive to wealthier Spanish residents, who preferred the flatter blocks near the Plaza de Armas.

By the seventeenth century, San Blas was the working address of the Cusco School of painting. Diego Quispe Tito, Marcos Zapata, Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao, and other Cusqueñan masters lived and ran workshops here. The painting tradition that produced the Last Supper with cuy in the cathedral was a San Blas industry. The painters were indigenous and mestizo. Their patrons were Catholic. The compositional language was Flemish and Italian, transmitted through prints imported from Europe; the iconographic content was negotiated between European Catholic subjects and Andean Catholic interpretation.

The painting tradition ebbed in the eighteenth century but the craft economy of the quarter never stopped. Wood carving, silver work, ceramics, textile production, all continued. The Mendívil workshop, the Mérida workshop, the Olave workshop, and others trace their family lineages back through nineteenth-century records and continue to operate today.

What "tradition" means here

A common reflex when describing a tradition like San Blas is to treat it as a survival, as if the quarter is preserving an ancient art in unbroken form. That framing is not accurate to how craft traditions actually work. Crafts adapt continuously. The Mendívil saints are a useful example.

Hilario Mendívil, born in 1929, ran a workshop in San Blas until his death in 1977. He worked in a centuries-old technique of building religious sculptures from a core of maguey, the agave-related plant whose long stalks are light, straight, and carveable. The core is plastered over, painted, dressed in fabric clothing, and given hair, glass eyes, and detailed features. The method is colonial. Hilario's innovation was the proportions. He gave his saints unusually long necks, like the necks of llamas, and a stylized elongation throughout the body. The result is immediately recognizable: a Mendívil saint, once you know the form, is not mistakable for anything else.

This is not a preservation of pre-Columbian aesthetics. It is a modernist twentieth-century reading of Andean iconography, made by a working artisan from San Blas who was deeply embedded in Catholic religious art and equally deeply embedded in highland Andean visual culture. His son Hilario Mendívil hijo continues the workshop on Plazoleta de San Blas. So do other members of the extended family. The form has stabilized; the maker has not.

The same pattern holds for the Olave workshop, which does silver work and devotional objects; for the Mérida ceramics tradition; for the Maximo Laura textile workshop, which produces large contemporary tapestries using traditional Andean weaving techniques but with abstract twentieth-century compositions. The tradition is what the artisans continue to do. It is not a fixed inheritance.

The cedar pulpit

The most famous single craft object in San Blas is the wooden pulpit inside the Church of San Blas. It is carved from a single cedar trunk, took roughly ten years to complete, and is generally considered the finest example of colonial wood sculpture in the Americas.

The pulpit dates from roughly 1670 to 1680. The carving covers every surface: a base of writhing serpents, columns of leaves and flowers, panels of biblical scenes, figures of saints, evangelists, Old Testament patriarchs, and a crowning figure of Saint Paul. The narrative reading in colonial Christian terms is straightforward. The technical reading is what staggers the visitor. Every surface, every figure, every joint between elements, is cut from the same cedar trunk without breaks. The pulpit is a single piece of wood, hollowed and carved continuously.

The carver is unknown. A persistent local tradition holds that he was an indigenous artist whose skull is embedded in the carving as a final detail. The provenance of the skull is uncertain; whether it was actually the artist's is unrecorded. What is recorded is that the church does not name the carver. The pulpit was an anonymous commission, paid for by the parish, executed by an indigenous or mestizo workshop in San Blas, and signed by no one. The most extraordinary single wood carving in colonial South America has no attributed maker.

That fact, by itself, is the most efficient summary of how colonial San Blas operated. The makers were indigenous. The credit, almost entirely, was not.

What the climb teaches

The Cuesta de San Blas, the steep cobblestone street that connects the historic center to the artisan quarter, has been the working route for the craftsmen for five hundred years. You climb it slowly, both because the gradient is severe and because the altitude is real. Halfway up, you pass the Sacred Heart of Jesus workshop where the Mérida family produces ceramics. Near the top, you reach the small plaza of San Blas, with the church on one side and the Mendívil workshop on the other.

What you have walked through is a vertical economy. The wealthier patrons of the colonial period lived near the Plaza de Armas. The artisans who made their devotional objects, their household ceramics, their silver chandeliers, lived uphill. The transaction was a downhill walk for the artisan, an uphill commission for the patron. Five hundred years later, the spatial logic is mostly intact, though the patrons are now tourists and the transactions are mostly cash.

The viewpoint at the top of San Blas, on Tandapata Street, looks down across the entire historic center. From here you can see all the way to the cathedral, La Compañía, Qorikancha, and the southern slopes of the city. The view is what the artisans saw on their way home in the evening for five centuries. The city below is what they helped build, materially. The workshops behind you are where they still do.

What an artisan barrio preserves

The honest answer is: not a static heritage but a working economy of skill transmission. The Mendívil saints are not preserved colonial objects; they are contemporary objects made by descendants of colonial workshops, in continuous practice. The Cusco School painting that supplied the Last Supper canvases in the cathedral is gone as an active industry, but the framing tradition, the gilding tradition, the wood-panel preparation tradition all continue in the same blocks. Cedar pulpit anonymity gave way over centuries to Mendívil's name on his work. The progression from anonymous indigenous makers to named indigenous-descended artisans is a small part of decolonization, made one workshop at a time.

The tour through San Blas is in part a tour through this progression. Stop one is the Archbishop's Palace, the colonial mansion built on the palace of Inca Roca, now the Museum of Religious Art. Stop four is the cedar pulpit in the Church of San Blas. Stop five is the Mendívil Museum. Walk those three stops in order and the through-line is clear: an artisan economy that began under colonial constraint, produced anonymously for the church, and now produces under contemporary terms with names attached.

A quarter that has kept working for five hundred years is not a heritage site. It is a place where people are at work this afternoon. Stop at any of the open doors. Look at what is being made. Buy something small if you want to. The cash will go to the artisan whose great-great-grandfather worked in the same room.