Hospicio Cabañas
Interesting facts
- Bishop Cabañas first planned a home for foundlings, but a royal decree of Charles IV in 1803 widened it to the elderly, disabled, sick, orphans and poor travellers.
- Orozco himself wrote to the governor of Jalisco that his chapel cycle was the greatest work of the whole Mexican mural movement begun in 1923.
- He painted the chapel during a four-year stay in Guadalajara at the invitation of governor Everardo Topete, which also produced murals for the state government palace.
- According to a popular reading, the figures around the Man of Fire portray fellow muralists Dr. Atl, Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, with Orozco himself in the flames.
- The dome rests on two rings of sixteen columns, Ionic inside and Doric outside, and its lantern was once crowned by a statue of Charity.
- After the Reform Laws of 1859 the Sisters of Charity ran the institution, and it was they who renamed it Hospicio Cabañas in honour of its founder.
- For a time in the mid-19th century the hospice was used as army barracks, and an earthquake in 1875 damaged its structure.
- Today the complex counts 23 courtyards, 106 rooms, 72 corridors and two chapels over roughly 23,450 square metres.
- A second, plainer chapel at the back of the complex, named after Tolsá, began life as the institution's dining hall.
Why it is worth it
Behind a long neoclassical front on the eastern edge of central Guadalajara lies one of the largest colonial-era buildings in the Americas, and inside its chapel, under a dome 32.5 metres high, one of the great mural cycles of the 20th century. The Hospicio Cabañas was founded by Bishop Juan Ruiz de Cabañas as a single institution that would serve at once as workhouse, hospital, orphanage and almshouse. Building began in 1796 to designs by the Mexico City architect Manuel Tolsá, who drew on models such as Les Invalides in Paris and El Escorial near Madrid; the institution opened in 1810, and work continued until 1829, several years after the bishop's death.
Tolsá kept the whole complex on a single level so that the old, the sick and children could move about easily. The result is a rectangle of roughly 164 by 145 metres, laid out around twenty-three courtyards of different sizes, with arcades, gardens and the domed chapel at the centre. The building kept its charitable role until 1980, when it became the Instituto Cultural Cabañas, with exhibition halls and schools of arts and crafts.
Its fame rests above all on José Clemente Orozco, the Jalisco-born muralist who covered the walls, vaults, pendentives and cupola of the main chapel with 57 frescoes in the late 1930s. The cycle moves from pre-Hispanic life through the Spanish conquest and the colonial era to modern times, in dark, forceful images, and culminates in the 11-metre dome with the figure known as the Man of Fire, a burning body rising into flames that is often counted among the high points of Mexican muralism. UNESCO inscribed the Hospicio Cabañas as a World Heritage Site in 1997. In 2014 the French artist Daniel Buren added coloured geometric installations to most of the courtyards.
Guadalajara, founded on its present site in 1542, is the capital of Jalisco and the centre of Mexico's third-largest metropolitan area, a city closely tied to mariachi music and to tequila. The Hospicio stands on the Plaza Tapatía in the old San Juan de Dios quarter of the historic centre.
Getting there
The Hospicio Cabañas is in the historic centre of Guadalajara, Mexico. The nearest airport is Guadalajara International Airport (GDL), about 17 km away. The city's light rail network serves the central districts.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Hospicio Cabañas or Cabañas Museum in Guadalajara, Jalisco was one of the oldest and largest orphanage and hospital complexes in the Americas. Now turned into a museum, the main hall hosts the magnum opus frescoes of muralist painter José Clemente Orozco. The place was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.
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