Hospicio de Jesús, María y José de Quito, 1785: a poorhouse and leprosarium paid for by a tax on sugar and wine
A house taken from the expelled Jesuits became Quito's poorhouse in 1785, funded by a bishop's pastoral appeal that raised over seven thousand pesos and then by earmarked levies on sugar, wine and cloth, a ceded municipal rent and a thousand pesos on each of two bishoprics. It was planned with wards for beggars, orphans and lepers, and its leprosarium opened with five patients. The king's order to put that ward outside the town was not obeyed.
Why this wins its question: Bourbon poor relief in Spanish America is usually illustrated from Mexico City and Lima; Quito's poorhouse is barely written up in English at all, and where it is, it appears as a date and a name. This object reconstructs it as a financed institution from the pages of the one historian who read the 1785 expediente: which Jesuit building it took and why the bishop argued for the other one, the pastoral that opened the subscription and what the first collection produced, and then the seven standing revenues, quoted item by item down to two reales on a load of local cloth leaving the city and the four hundred pesos of the Añaquito ejido that the town council gave up. The same pages carry what a celebratory account would omit — that the plan obliged every poor person to work or learn a trade and authorised taking beggars off the street, that the leprosarium opened with five patients, and that the king's order to build it outside the town was disobeyed.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The house came out of the Jesuit expulsion, and the record shows two officials arguing about which building to use. González Suárez, printed page 327: in the dispositions issued on how the houses that had belonged to the Jesuits were to be distributed "se prevenía que se destinara una para Hospicio de pobres y establecimiento de Caridad". The junta de Temporalidades, under President Pizarro, began adjudicating the Quito houses to the objects determined in the Conde de Aranda's instruction and assigned the Colegio máximo for Hospicio and the Noviciado for the infantry barracks; the bishop, Blas Sobrino y Minayo, "hizo presente que esta segunda era más á propósito para Hospicio de pobres, y la del Colegio para cuartel", the swap was accepted, "pero la fundación del Hospicio no se llevó á cabo sino en tiempo del Presidente Villalengua".
The money was raised first by an open subscription whose terms were left entirely to the giver. Printed page 329: on 12 April 1785 the bishop published a pastoral letter exhorting the faithful to contribute to the foundation of a hospice for beggars, which — as the prelate put it — Christian charity and "la misma cultura social de la Capital de la Presidencia" alike demanded. Two honourable persons were named to collect the alms and a subscription was opened of all contributors: "quedó á la libre elección de cada uno la cantidad con que resolvía contribuir, y aun el plazo y la materia, siendo voluntario el hacer las erogaciones en dinero ó en especies, y el darlas cada semana, cada mes ó cada año. La primera colecta produjo más de siete mil pesos."
The standing revenues are itemised in a footnote, and they are the part of the story nobody quotes. González Suárez, printed page 330, lists the first funds assigned to the Hospicio: "Un real por cada arroba de azúcar: Un peso por cada botija de vino ordinario: Dos pesos por cada botija del vino de Chile: Dos reales por cada carga de ropas de la tierra, que se extrajeran de la ciudad á cualquiera punto del distrito de esta Audiencia"; "Un mil pesos sobre cada una de las mitras de Quito y de Cuenca"; "El arrendamiento del ejido de Añaquito, que producía 400 pesos anuales. Esta era una de las entradas del Cabildo civil y fué cedida al Hospicio"; and "Nueve mil pesos dejados para una casa de huérfanos por el Doctor Don Vicente Anagoitia Arcediano de Quito: el Obispo los adjudicó al Hospicio y se pusieron á crédito con el interés del cinco por ciento". An excise on sugar and wine, an export duty on local cloth, a levy on two bishoprics, a ceded municipal rent and an invested bequest — that is the whole balance sheet of the city's poor relief.
Its government was split between the two founders and its plan had three wards. Printed page 329: the bishop gave it its name and called it "Hospicio de Jesús, María y José"; "la administración temporal se dejó á cargo de la autoridad civil, y el cuidado y régimen en lo espiritual se declaró que pertenecía al Diocesano"; and president and bishop each imposed some contributions with which they provided the establishment with funds. By the founders' original intention the house was to have three departments — "uno, el principal, para los mendigos; el segundo para huérfanos ó niños expósitos, y el tercero para leprosos" — with men and women in separate quarters in each. Printed page 328 adds that its first administrator, Don Joaquín Tinajero, served "por caridad, sin sueldo ni remuneración alguna".
The leprosarium is the concrete result and it opened small. Printed page 328: by the plan agreed by the founders a site was set aside within the house's grounds "para los enfermos de elefancia; y así que se tuvieron concluidas las viviendas que en aquel lugar se construyeron, se fundó el Lazareto con cinco enfermos, que fueron los primeros que allí se recogieron". Five patients is what the source states, and no source read here gives a later figure.
The compulsion is in the founders' own reasoning and is inseparable from the charity. Printed page 328: deploring the propensity of the common people to idleness "y la facilidad de cubrirse de harapos sucios para mendigar el pan de puerta en puerta", the bishop and the president "resolvieron que la casa del Hospicio fuera el santuario del trabajo, y que á todos los pobres se los constriñera á sacudir la pereza y trabajar", each working in proportion to his health and strength, only those physically incapable exempted. "Si el pobre sabía un arte, debía ejercitarse en él; si no lo sabía, debía aprenderlo"; and every poor person, by the mere fact of going begging through the streets, "debía ser recogido en el Hospicio, donde se le acudiría con alimento, vestido y lo demás de que tuviera necesidad". The historian's own comment on the work rule — "pensamiento de veras moralizador" — is his approval, not evidence of how the rule was applied.
The crown's approval came with a public-health condition that was ignored locally, and the source says so in one line. Printed page 330: "El Rey aprobó la fundación de la casa, pero disponiendo que se construyese fuera de poblado, y no en la misma ciudad, el departamento para los leprosos: por desgracia, tan atinada disposición no fué obedecida." Whatever else it shows, the episode is a case of a metropolitan sanitary order overridden by local practice, recorded by a writer sympathetic to the founders.
The scale should be judged against the timescale, and the source itself supplies the yardstick. On printed pages 328 and 329 González Suárez calls the Hospicio "la segunda casa de caridad pública que iba á tener la Capital de la colonia, á los dos siglos y medio de su existencia" — the second such house in two hundred and fifty years — and adds that it was still, when he wrote in 1894, "una de las casas de caridad que todavía existen en Quito". The institution outlasted the empire that built it; it was also, by its own historian's count, very nearly the first of its kind in the city.
What this evidence carries and what it does not. The account is a single nineteenth-century witness, but a documented one: he cites by name the "Expediente formado sobre el Hospicio y recogimiento de esta ciudad (Quito). Año de 1785", in the archive of the ecclesiastical notary of the Quito Curia, and notes that Minayo's pastoral was printed that same year in Quito, in what was then the city's only press. That supports the dates, the names, the rules and the schedule of revenues. It is not evidence of how many people the house held, whether the levies on sugar, wine and cloth were actually collected or what they yielded, how long the orphan ward operated, or how the inmates were treated. No claim here should be read as a measure of outcomes.