{
  "id": "estanco-de-la-nieve-de-nueva-espana",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The ramo de la nieve: the snow monopoly of New Spain",
  "summary": "Snow cut on the Sierra Nevada and carried through Chalco to Mexico City was a farmed royal revenue. The treasury history of 1792 prints the auction conditions - a fixed price of one real the pound, selling hours, guards, house searches - and the yield, 632,171 pesos between 1765 and 1790. An auto acordado of 1656 bars drafted Indian labour from the snow contract on the ground that men paid well and punctually come of their own accord.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "new-spain",
    "mexico",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "royal-treasury",
    "public-supply",
    "labour",
    "seventeenth-century",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-de-gobierno-de-los-virreyes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tamemes-y-el-cargar-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "monte-de-piedad-de-animas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "arancel-para-los-venteros-de-la-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-ordenanza-de-intendentes-1786"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mita"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Was there an ice or snow trade in colonial Mexico?",
    "What was the ramo de la nieve in the Spanish Indies?",
    "How did the Spanish crown regulate the price of everyday goods in New Spain?",
    "Was forced Indian labour used for the snow and gunpowder contracts of New Spain?",
    "How much did the snow monopoly of New Spain yield to the royal treasury?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "Snow was a taxed article of consumption in New Spain, and the treasury's own historians say why in their first sentence. The chapter headed NIEVE in the Historia general de Real Hacienda, compiled by Fabian de Fonseca and Carlos de Urrutia by order of the viceroy conde de Revillagigedo, opens: \"Ha sido la nieve, que no es otra cosa que la agua congelada, o reducida a carambanos, un efecto que por no ser de la primera ni segunda necesidad, las potestades legitimas lo han aplicado a su patrimonio. El laborioso Plauto lo atestigua, y no es menester mas para conocer la antiguedad de este arbitrio.\" The fiscal doctrine is explicit: what is not a necessity of the first or second order may be appropriated to the royal patrimony. The chapter is dated at Mexico, 29 August 1792, and signed by Urrutia and Fonseca, and it is introduced by an oficio of the ministers of the real hacienda of 3 October 1792 who found the chronological description of the ramo \"digna de aprobarse\".",
      "sources": [
        "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "New Spain and Peru took different routes to the same revenue, and the compilers are candid about the limits of their own archive. \"En el reino del Peru se estanco en tiempo del virey conde de Chinchon, en virtud de reales disposiciones. No fue asi aqui, pues la noticia mas atrasada que hemos encontrado es, que a consecuencia de una del superior gobierno, espedida en veinte de Diciembre de mil setecientos diez y nueve, se remato por cinco anos y en cada uno la pension de diez mil pesos.\" They add that from that date to their own \"no ha habido otras reglas y ordenanzas en este ramo, que las condiciones de los asentistas\" - the contract, not a code, was the law of the trade - and that the asientos ran in five- or nine-year terms at the contractors' preference.",
      "sources": [
        "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "A snow contract existed in New Spain at least sixty-three years before the earliest notice the treasury historians could find. The auto acordado of the Real Audiencia of Mexico of 4 May 1656, number XCVIII in the summary compilation Eusebio Bentura Belena printed in 1787, orders in its seventh chapter \"Que no se den Indios algunos para ningun asiento de Polvora, Nieve, o otro\". The wording is a rule about labour, not a description of the revenue, so it does not establish that the ramo was already farmed to the crown in the later sense; what it does establish is that an asiento de nieve was a recognised kind of contract in Mexico in 1656, which is not what the fiscal record on its own would suggest.",
      "sources": [
        "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos",
        "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "That same chapter of 1656 states a labour rule and states an economic reason for it. Under the marginal rubric \"No se den Indios de repartimiento para asientos o obras\", the audiencia orders that no Indians be given for any contract of gunpowder or snow, \"ni para la fabrica de la Iglesia mayor, por haber mostrado la experiencia, que pagados bien y con puntualidad, acuden a trabajar voluntariamente quantos son menester.\" The ground offered is not compassion but observed fact: paid well and on time, as many workers as are needed come of their own accord. The cathedral of Mexico is named in the same breath as the two contracts, so the rule reaches the most prestigious building site in the viceroyalty.",
      "sources": [
        "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The value of that rule is measured by what stands beside it on the same printed page, and the compilation does not hide it. The eighth chapter of the same auto forbids that \"ningun Espanol, Mulato, Negro o Mestizo atajen los Indios que pasan por la calle, y con violencia los entren en sus casas para que se las barran y limpien, y sus cavalgaduras y caballerizas\". The ninth orders that complaints of the \"malos tratamientos de las imposiciones y tareas que reparten a los Indios los Alcaldes mayores\" not be deferred to the residencia, because the delay doubles the vexations and the Indians flee to the despoblados rather than return to their pueblos, \"perdiendo sus casas y haciendas, y S. M. sus Tributarios y Tributos\". The tenth orders the irons struck off Indians \"aprisionados o vendidos\" in obrajes, panaderias, ingenios and mines, and that the auto be explained to them by their interpreters and gobernadores. A prohibition is evidence of the practice it prohibits: the snow contract was barred from drafted labour in a city where people were being seized off the street to sweep houses.",
      "sources": [
        "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The 1787 auction conditions, which Fonseca and Urrutia print as being \"con corta diferencia, las que han regido siempre desde el indicado origen\", regulate the article as a supply and not only as a tax. The asentista was to give \"la libra de nieve a real desde las seis de la manana hasta las nueve de la noche, sin que pudiera hacersele cargo a este abasto el dia que faltara a el por algun motivo inculpable\"; the guards of the city gates were not to detain snow \"sino que pasara a la hora que entrara, por la merma que padece en el caso contrario\"; the seven-league district of the asiento was extended on the side of Chalco \"hasta la Sierra Nevada, donde se coge este genero, con inclusion de los pueblos de su transito\"; and the conditions were to be cried in public places \"para que llegaran a noticia de todos, y no pudieran alegar ignorancia en su cumplimiento\". A fixed price, fixed hours, an excused day, protection of the article against spoilage at the customs gates, and publication of the terms are all in the contract.",
      "sources": [
        "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The enforcement side of the same contract is equally explicit and belongs in any honest account of it. No person might bring in snow \"bajo la pena de perdimiento de la bestia o carruage en que se condujera\"; the justices were to give the asentista whatever assistance he needed and he named his own guards; no convent or private house might use any snow but the estanco's; the gate guards were to admit \"granizo o yelo\" only for cooling water for sale, with a third of the value of what they seized as their reward, \"como si fueran simples denunciantes\"; and the asentista or his administrator could, \"con cualquiera sospecha\", search the house or place where he suspected the conditions were being broken. A regulated supply and a policed monopoly are the same instrument seen from two sides.",
      "sources": [
        "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The trade had a disputed customer and the dispute was adjudicated. In 1788 the owners of the houses \"donde se garapinan las bebidas\" complained of the poor quality of the snow the asentista supplied and of being obliged to take a fixed daily quota, \"sobre esto se siguio un renido pleito, que fue terminado por la junta superior de real hacienda en favor del asentista, con la circunstancia de que no se estrechase a los botilleros a llevarla de una vez, sino como la fueran pidiendo; a cuyo fin llevaran un cuaderno donde se asentasen las partidas hasta completar el numero asignado\". The monopolist won, but with a condition written into the judgment for the buyers, and a book of entries to police both parties. The named consumers on these sheets are the botilleros and the makers of iced drinks, not hospitals.",
      "sources": [
        "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The figures are printed in full and they are not small. The postura of the 1787 conditions was ten thousand pesos, but \"se verifico el remate, por las pujas que hubo, en diez y nueve mil seiscientos veinticinco pesos anuales\". Outside the capital the ramo was farmed \"en varios parajes\" whose products entered the treasuries of Puebla, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Valladolid, Guanajuato and Guadalajara, and in 1790 those amounted to 6,323, 1,300, 550, 745, 180 and 740 pesos respectively, a total of 9,838. The general series of the ramo from 1765 to 1790, printed year by year, runs from 21,025 pesos in 1765 to 31,641 in 1790 and sums 632,171 pesos, 0 reales, 6 granos. The compilers close: \"Este ramo no tiene gastos algunos, porque se maneja por oficiales reales, como los demas de real hacienda.\"",
      "sources": [
        "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "What these two witnesses cannot supply should be stated, because it is the part a reader most wants. Neither gives the quantity of snow carried, the route or the time it took, the number of people employed on the Sierra Nevada or in the pueblos of the transit, what any of them were paid, or whether the rule of 1656 was still observed a century later when the contract was worth nineteen thousand pesos a year. Neither records a medical use: the consumers named are botilleros and houses that iced drinks, so this entry makes no claim that the ramo supplied hospitals. Both are official documents of the system that ran it - a treasury history written to order by two crown accountants, and a judge of the audiencia abstracting the orders of his own court - and no voice of a carrier, a cutter or a buyer appears in either.",
      "sources": [
        "fonseca-urrutia-real-hacienda-iv",
        "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Colonial Mexican snow appears today, when it appears at all, as an anecdote: runners bringing ice from the volcanoes for the viceroy's sorbets. The documents make it something else, and nobody quotes them. This entry goes to the chapter NIEVE of the treasury history Fonseca and Urrutia compiled by order of Revillagigedo and prints what a farmed article of daily consumption actually looked like - the fiscal doctrine that a non-necessity belongs to the royal patrimony, the price of one real the pound between six in the morning and nine at night, the excused day, the order that the city gates not hold the load because of the merma, the seven-league district running to the Sierra Nevada through Chalco, the house searches and the guards' third share, the 1788 lawsuit the ice-drink makers lost with a condition attached, and the 632,171 pesos the ramo yielded between 1765 and 1790. Then it sets against that fiscal record a judicial one nobody has connected to it: the auto acordado of 4 May 1656, printed by Belena in 1787, which bars drafted Indians from \"ningun asiento de Polvora, Nieve, o otro\" on the stated ground that men paid well and punctually come to work of their own accord - a snow contract sixty-three years earlier than the earliest notice the treasury's own historians could find, and a labour rule standing on the same page as the abuses that made it necessary.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-18",
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    "name": "The ramo de la nieve: the snow monopoly of New Spain",
    "description": "Snow cut on the Sierra Nevada and carried through Chalco to Mexico City was a farmed royal revenue. The treasury history of 1792 prints the auction conditions - a fixed price of one real the pound, selling hours, guards, house searches - and the yield, 632,171 pesos between 1765 and 1790. An auto acordado of 1656 bars drafted Indian labour from the snow contract on the ground that men paid well and punctually come of their own accord.",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-18",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia general de Real Hacienda, tomo IV",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=cj5KAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA488"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Recopilación sumaria de los autos acordados de la Real Audiencia de esta Nueva España, que desde el año de 1677 hasta el de 1786 han podido recogerse",
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    "headline": "The ramo de la nieve: the snow monopoly of New Spain"
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}