{
  "id": "vasco-de-quiroga-pueblos-hospitales",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Vasco de Quiroga's pueblos-hospitales of Santa Fe (New Spain, 1530s)",
  "summary": "Two settlements founded near Mexico City and in Michoacán by a judge of the second Audiencia who paid for them out of his own salary, governed by written ordinances that fixed a six-hour common working day, distributed the product by household need, elected their own officers by annual rotation, and kept a salaried physician, surgeon and apothecary. The ordinances survive because the college Quiroga founded printed them in 1766 — a partisan publisher, and that is stated here.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "new-spain",
    "michoacan",
    "institutions",
    "hospitals",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "labour"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "motolinia-historia-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hospital-dels-ignocents"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hernan-cortes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mita"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ordenanzas-de-poblacion-1573"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "pedro-de-san-jose-betancur"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "orden-hospitalaria-de-belen"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "villasenor-theatro-americano-1748"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "segunda-audiencia-de-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-san-nicolas-obispo"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-san-nicolas-de-michoacan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juan-de-san-miguel-de-uruapan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "abad-y-queipo-coleccion-de-escritos-1813"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hospital-de-jesus-nazareno-de-mexico"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-san-nicolas-obispo-de-michoacan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "fray-juan-de-san-miguel-uruapan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relacion-de-michoacan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hospital-de-la-cuna-de-santa-fe"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tardes-americanas-1778"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What were the pueblos-hospitales of Santa Fe?",
    "What did Vasco de Quiroga's ordinances actually require?",
    "Did the pueblos-hospitales of Santa Fe have a six-hour working day?",
    "Who governed Quiroga's hospital-towns?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "Quiroga's ordinances for the settlements were printed under the title \"Reglas, y ordenanzas para el gobierno de los hospitales de Santa Fè de Mexico, y Michoacan, dispuestas por su fundador el Rmo. y Venerable Sr. D. Vasco de Quiroga, primer obispo de Michoacan\", and set a common working day of six hours, referred to throughout as \"las seis horas\".",
      "sources": [
        "quiroga-reglas-ordenanzas-santafe"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "What the six common hours produced was to be gathered and then divided among all the inhabitants, each receiving what he needed \"para si, y para su familia\" according to his condition; once the hospital's own costs were met, the remainder was to go to other works of charity and to the relief of the settlement's poor, whom the ordinance names — orphans, wards, widows, the aged of both sexes, the sick, the crippled and the blind.",
      "sources": [
        "quiroga-reglas-ordenanzas-santafe"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Every rural estancia was required to keep a large kitchen garden and to sow European and American plants side by side — fruit trees \"de todo genero de arboles frutiferos de Castilla, y de la tierra\", vegetables, flax, hemp, wheat, maize and barley — and, when the fields had been tended, the settlers were to be set to quarrying and dressing stone, felling and working timber, and gathering grana and cochineal, expressly so that idleness should not harm them, all of it reckoned against the same six hours.",
      "sources": [
        "quiroga-reglas-ordenanzas-santafe"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "Office was partly elective and deliberately rotated: the heads of household elected from among themselves a Principal, to serve three or six years, and with him three or four Regidores to be elected each year \"de manera, que ande la rueda por todos los casados habiles\" — but the election was held with the assent of the Rector, a secular priest, who gave leave for it, so the rotation operated inside a clerical framework rather than independently of one.",
      "sources": [
        "quiroga-reglas-ordenanzas-santafe"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The ordinances required that the sick be given first and best of whatever the hospital had, that an apothecary, a physician and a surgeon be salaried to visit and treat them, and that patients with contagious diseases be lodged apart from the healthy.",
      "sources": [
        "quiroga-reglas-ordenanzas-santafe"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "Moreno's 1766 life reports that Quiroga, while an oidor of the Audiencia of Mexico, founded the two hospitals two leagues from the capitals of Mexico and Michoacán at his own charge, out of a salary of 600,000 maravedís and 150,000 of ayuda de costa, a sum Moreno computes at 2,757 pesos fuertes and 28 maravedís.",
      "sources": [
        "moreno-1766-vida-quiroga"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Santa Fe de México also kept a foundling hospital — Moreno calls it a Brephotrophio, \"el Hospital de la cuna\" — where abandoned infants were baptised, put out to salaried wet-nurses, clothed at the settlement's cost and, on reaching age, given the same occupations as the other children of the town.",
      "sources": [
        "moreno-1766-vida-quiroga"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Quoting Torquemada's account of 1615, Moreno records that Quiroga bought with his own money the lands around Santa Fe and gave them to those gathered there to sow, and that he was consecrated bishop of Michoacán in 1537 and held the see for 28 years.",
      "sources": [
        "moreno-1766-vida-quiroga"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The settlements were an instrument of congregation and religious instruction, not a voluntary commune: the same source records the bishop advising the Emperor to exempt the Chichimecas from tribute once they had been \"reducidos, y pacificados\" — the gathering of dispersed peoples into fixed towns — and describes them in the language of the period as \"aquella nacion barbara\". The contemporary cost of that gathering is not documented in this source and is not asserted here.",
      "sources": [
        "moreno-1766-vida-quiroga"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The chief printed witness is an interested one. The 1766 Fragmentos was written by Juan Joseph Moreno while he was Rector of the Colegio Primitivo de San Nicolás — the college Quiroga founded — and was published by that college, as its own title page states; it is a devotional life advancing his memory, and its biographical figures should be read at that discount. The ordinances it prints are a different kind of evidence and are cited separately here.",
      "sources": [
        "moreno-1766-vida-quiroga"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English coverage of Quiroga is a sentence about a bishop who read Thomas More, repeated without a text behind it. This object goes to the printed ordinances themselves — the six-hour day, the distribution by household need, the annual rotation of the regimiento, the salaried physician and the isolation of contagious patients, quoted from the page — and, in the same breath, registers that the only printing available is the one his own college produced to support his cause, and that the towns were congregation as well as charity. Nothing else in reach states both halves from the document.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-09",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/vasco-de-quiroga-pueblos-hospitales",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/vasco-de-quiroga-pueblos-hospitales.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Vasco de Quiroga's pueblos-hospitales of Santa Fe (New Spain, 1530s)",
    "description": "Two settlements founded near Mexico City and in Michoacán by a judge of the second Audiencia who paid for them out of his own salary, governed by written ordinances that fixed a six-hour common working day, distributed the product by household need, elected their own officers by annual rotation, and kept a salaried physician, surgeon and apothecary. The ordinances survive because the college Quiroga founded printed them in 1766 — a partisan publisher, and that is stated here.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/vasco-de-quiroga-pueblos-hospitales",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-09",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Reglas, y ordenanzas para el gobierno de los hospitales de Santa Fè de Mexico, y Michoacan, dispuestas por su fundador el Rmo. y Venerable Sr. D. Vasco de Quiroga, primer obispo de Michoacan",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=QSx5kXUcEDsC&pg=RA1-PA1"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Fragmentos de la vida y virtudes del V. Illmo. y Rmo. Sr. Dr. D. Vasco de Quiroga, primer obispo de la Santa Iglesia Cathedral de Michoacan",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=QSx5kXUcEDsC&printsec=frontcover"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Vasco de Quiroga's pueblos-hospitales of Santa Fe (New Spain, 1530s)"
  }
}