The transfer of the city of Guatemala after the earthquake of 1773
After the earthquake of 29 July 1773 the capital of the kingdom of Guatemala was surveyed, argued over in open assembly, and moved to another valley at royal expense — one of the earliest documented cases of a state relocating a capital as seismic risk management. The dissenting party is on the record too, and so is the proclamation that ordered the old ground left empty — which seven or eight thousand people, mostly mulatos, did not obey.
Why this wins its question: The abandonment of Antigua Guatemala is usually told as a picturesque ruin with a date attached. This entry reconstructs it as an administrative sequence from an eyewitness chronicle — the seismic record that preceded it, the two-sided argument in the city, the valley surveys, the citizens' assembly of January 1774, the ten years of alcabala revenue voted to pay for the move, and the proclamation that ordered the old ground left empty. Then, from the same author's geographical chapters, the two facts that undo the tidy version: the old city still held seven to eight thousand people, mostly mulatos, and was given a municipality again in 1799; and the new capital was planted beside an Indian and mulato town that lost its alcaldes, its two Indian regidores and its parish to the arrival. The epidemics that followed stand next to the achievement, so the case is made by accumulation rather than by leaving out the cost.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Juarros gives the capital a seismic record before 1773 rather than a single catastrophe: two violent earthquakes on 4 March 1751, one at eight in the morning and one at two in the afternoon, doing great damage especially to the churches; the tremor called San Francisco in 1757; that of the Santísima Trinidad in 1765, which ruined the province of Chiquimula; and the San Rafael, which did great damage in Suchiltepéquez. He also records a flood: after tenacious rain on 8 October 1762 the rivers rose in the small hours of the 9th, ruining the town of Petapa and drowning the barrio of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in the city itself.
The destruction of 1773 is described by a witness. Tremors began in May, one on 11 June damaged houses and churches, and on the afternoon of 29 July, "á cosa de las cuatro", a violent shock was followed by the earthquake that ruined Guatemala — whose duration and variety of movement, Juarros writes, is not easy to describe "aun á los que fuimos testigos de esta tragedia". Shocks continued for days, with a large one on 7 September and a greater on 13 December that caused much havoc among buildings already damaged.
The decision to move was contested in the city, and the case against it is the better argued of the two in this source. One party, terrified by the ruin, wanted the city carried to a site less exposed to tremors and further from the volcanoes; the other held, "apoyados en la constante esperiencia de que no hay sitio en todo el Reino en que no se sientan por tiempos notables movimientos de tierra", that since the city would be exposed to earthquakes anywhere it was better to rebuild than to lose its fine waters, mild climate and the convenience of its own ruins as building material.
The transfer was carried out by survey and assembly, not by decree alone. A junta of 4 August 1773, presided over by the president of the Audiencia and attended by the archbishop, resolved a provisional move to the burgo de la Ermita while the valleys of Jalapa and las Vacas were inspected by a commission of one minister of the Audiencia, two prebendaries of the cathedral chapter, a regidor and one citizen; the president and the royal tribunals moved to the Ermita on 6 September 1773; the surveyors' diligencias were read to an assembly of the citizenry held in the provisional city from 12 to 16 January 1774, which resolved by plurality of votes on formal transfer to the valle de las Vacas.
The Crown confirmed the resolution on 21 July 1775 and, by cédula of 21 September, approved most of the projects submitted for carrying out the move and assigned the yield of the alcabala revenue for ten years to pay for it. The ayuntamiento was installed on the new site on 1 January 1776. On 29 July 1777 — the fourth anniversary of the earthquake — a proclamation was published in the old city ordering that within one year everyone transfer themselves "y quede aquel suelo desierto".
Moving did not end the calamity, and the same page says so. An epidemic of petechial fevers broke out among the ruined citizenry, "que quitó á muchos la vida", and did not abate until May 1774; the removal to the new capital was followed by flood scares, a hailstorm feared heavy enough to bring down the roofs, frequent deaths by lightning, and in 1780 a smallpox epidemic of such malignancy that within a few days many were dead and it spread through the whole kingdom.
The order to empty the old city was not obeyed, and the same volume says so in its geographical section. Antigua Guatemala kept between seven and eight thousand inhabitants after the transfer, "algunos españoles, y los mas mulatos"; in 1799, by virtue of a cédula of 4 August 1786, it was declared a villa and made head of the province of Sacatepéquez, with two ordinary alcaldes and a síndico chosen from its Spanish residents. Twenty years after the proclamation the abandoned ground had a municipality again, and the people who had stayed on it were mostly the ones least able to move.
The new capital was not built on empty land. The valle de las Vacas already held the burgo of la Ermita de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, a town of Spaniards, mulatos and Indians begun about 1620 when some twenty Indian families were brought from the hills called Canalitos to serve the hermitage and were exempted from tribute by royal cédula; having multiplied, they petitioned president Fernando de Escobedo for a site and ejidos for their fields and obtained it on 2 September of the same year, by autos before the escribano receptor Lorenzo Pérez de Rivera. The town formerly had its own parish priest, an ordinary alcalde and two Spanish regidores and another alcalde and two Indian regidores; once the capital was established beside it, Juarros writes, "se mira éste como uno de sus arrabales", justice in it is administered by the alcaldes of the city, and its curacy was absorbed into one of the metropolitan parishes.
The episode is still cited in the seismological literature as the standard illustration of its kind: a 2016 paleoseismic study of Guatemala in Scientific Reports observes that "the repetition of seismic destructions, even on more resilient societies, can motivate city abandonment or relocation, as illustrated in Guatemala by the relocation of the capital city Antigua Guatemala during the 18th century after a series of shallow destructive earthquakes affecting the Central American volcanic arc."
What this entry deliberately does not assert. Juarros gives no death toll for 1773, no cost figure for the transfer, and no description of how the new city was laid out or built, so none is stated here; nor is any modern magnitude estimate given, since the paleoseismic paper cited discusses other events and mentions the relocation only in the single sentence quoted. The account is that of a Guatemalan secular priest who lived through the earthquake and wrote in the new capital, which makes him a strong witness to the event and an interested one on the wisdom of the move. Day-level dates are given as printed; the 1857 types make 1 and 4, and 3 and 5, hard to separate at scan resolution, and years are reported where the chronology of the passage fixes them.