Templo de San Francisco

Why Go

The First Franciscan House

This is the best short lesson in the historic centre on what the city has lost and how far it has sunk. The Franciscans were the first order sent to New Spain, and their house here was the largest in the territory. Today you step off a busy shopping street, through an eighteenth-century carved gate, and down into an atrium that sits well below the pavement. The church itself is fine; the point is the gap between the founding and what survives.

From Thirty Thousand Square Metres to One Church

The Franciscans were the first of the mendicant orders sent to the newly conquered territory, and a group of twelve friars under Martín de Valencia arrived in 1524 to begin the mission. Land on the western edge of the rebuilt city was granted for their house, and the convent that grew there became the largest in New Spain, still covering more than thirty thousand square metres in the nineteenth century. It held cloisters, chapels, schools and gardens, and it was the base from which the order worked across central Mexico. That work was carried out inside a colonial system of conquest and forced labour, and honest accounts of it hold both the mission and its setting together. The present church is largely the rebuilding of 1716, and the carved portal on Calle Madero dates from later in that century. In the nineteenth century the complex was suppressed, broken up and partly demolished, streets were cut through the grounds, and the church itself passed out of Catholic use for a period before being restored to it. Calle Madero now runs across ground that was once inside the walls.