La Compañía de Jesús, Quito

La Compañía de Jesús is the church that Quito shows when it wants to show off. From the street the facade is a wall of grey volcanic andesite carved as finely as wood; inside, almost every surface — vaults, pilasters, altarpieces, pulpit — is covered in carved cedar laid with gold leaf over a red ground, so that the whole interior seems to glow. A travelling Jesuit once called it a golden ember, and it has been named the Temple of Solomon of South America. It stands a short walk from the Plaza Grande, in the historic centre that UNESCO inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1978.

Its building took the Jesuits a century and a half. Work began in earnest in 1605 on plans sent from Rome, and the Italian Jesuit Marcos Guerra, who arrived in 1636, gave the church its Renaissance bones: the barrel-vaulted nave, the side chapels under small domes, the great dome over the crossing, about 27 m high and lit by twelve windows. The plan recalls the Gesù in Rome, though with three naves instead of one. Because the site was cut by a ravine running down from Pichincha volcano, Guerra first had to bridge it with brick arches to create level ground. The facade came last: begun by Leonardo Deubler in 1722, abandoned three years later and finished by Venancio Gandolfi in 1765. Its central door is framed by six Solomonic columns, each about five metres high, modelled on Bernini's twisted columns in Saint Peter's, with full-length statues of Jesuit saints in the niches. A tall bell tower once rose beside it, but the earthquakes of 1859 and 1868 brought it down to its base.

Inside, look for the details within the gold. The geometric patterns on the pillars are Mudéjar, an echo of Moorish Spain; the high altar, carved over a decade from 1735 and gilded under the sculptor Bernardo de Legarda, rises in tiers of twisted columns; the pulpit is crowded with some 250 small cherub faces. Along the pilasters hang the Sixteen Prophets painted by Nicolás de Goríbar in the seventeenth century, and at the end of the side aisles two huge canvases of Hell and the Last Judgement by Hernando de la Cruz, painted in 1620, were meant to frighten a congregation into piety. A side chapel holds the remains of Mariana de Jesús, the city's patron saint, who was buried here at her wish.

Getting there

The church is on the corner of García Moreno and Sucre streets in Quito's historic centre, a short walk from the Plaza Grande and the cathedral; the old town is compact and best explored on foot. Mariscal Sucre International Airport (UIO) lies about 21 km away in a straight line.