Cantuña and the Church of San Francisco

Quito's best-known legend says that an indigenous man named Cantuña, unable to finish the atrium of San Francisco on time, sold his soul to the devil for a night's work by a crew of demons, then hid one stone so the job would be incomplete at dawn and the contract void. The trouble is that the story is young and the documents are old. Neither of the two oldest written versions contains a contract, a deadline or a hidden stone: the Franciscan Juan de Santa Gertrudis, writing around 1757-1767, has Cantuña trade his soul merely for three days' warning of his own death, and the Jesuit Juan de Velasco, writing in 1789, has him invent the pact in open court, to keep the judges away from Atahualpa's treasure. Velasco calls it "una célebre ficción" and insists Cantuña was a good Christian throughout. Meanwhile the archives give the chapel that bears his name to an indigenous confraternity building in the 1580s, the church beside it to master builders working through the 1610s and 1620s, and Cantuña himself to the ironworkers' trade — with a burial slab dated 1669 still fixed to the cloister wall.

Two men answer to the name Cantuña, and only one of them is in the archives. The documented one was Francisco Cantuña, an indigenous blacksmith and locksmith from Sangolquí, a town southeast of Quito, who worked in the city in the second half of the seventeenth century. The Franciscans' own museum describes him without a trace of brimstone: a "herrero prodigioso en la ciudad de Quito del s. XVII", "un indígena original del pueblo de Sangolquí", and one of the principal patrons of a chapel that already existed long before he endowed it. He bought the right to a seat and a burial place inside it and paid for masses to be sung, and within a generation nobody called the building anything else. The name over the door is a donor's name, not a builder's. There is an object to set beside the documents. A stone slab is fixed to the east wall of the convent's main cloister, a few metres from the entrance to the Fray Pedro Gocial museum: "Ésta es la sepultura de Francisco Cantuña y sus herederos. Año de 1669." That is the year he secured the grave, not the year he filled it. Ecuadorian press, citing the genealogist Fernando Jurado Noboa, dates to 6 February 1696 an iron door he delivered for the convent gatehouse — a metalworker at the end of the job, not a contractor at the start of it. And the building itself has an author, or rather several, all of them named. The art historian Susan Verdi Webster went through the notarial and Franciscan archives for Quito, ciudad de maestros (2012) and found that the chapel now called Cantuña is the oldest surviving piece of the whole Franciscan complex: a petition in the Archivo General de Indias records that around 1585–87 the newly constituted Cofradía de la Vera Cruz de los Naturales — the convent's indigenous confraternity, distinct from the Spaniards' — was raising its own chapel in a corner of the first cloister, "muy sumptuosa y de mucha autoridad y costa". The present church and its façade, Webster shows against the received chronology, date from the second and third decades of the seventeenth century, with the Portuguese stonemason Gaspar de Borjes contracted in 1618 as "maestro arquitecto". A Franciscan document names the men who did the work: the indigenous father-and-son team Jorge de la Cruz and Francisco Morocho, responsible for "la hechura desta iglesia y capilla mayor y coro de San Fran[cis]co", at it "mas de veinte años". Jorge de la Cruz had been brought to Quito from Guaclachiri in the 1540s by way of Lima, where he learned to build Spanish houses. Even the famous concave-convex staircase in front of the church is not a mystery: it reproduces a Bramante design engraved in the Spanish editions of Serlio's Tercero y cuarto libro de arquitectura. The legend, meanwhile, arrived in stages, and every stage can be dated. The earliest telling anyone has traced was written by the Mallorcan Franciscan Juan de Santa Gertrudis, who travelled through South America between 1757 and 1767; his manuscript stayed in Palma and was not printed until 1956, in Bogotá. His Cantuña does sign a pact, but the terms are strange: a bond "escrita de sangre propia y propia mano, con la condición que lo había de avisar tres días antes de su muerte". What he buys is three days' notice of his own death. Santa Gertrudis also passes on the talk that demons carved most of the chapel's stones. The version that made Cantuña famous is Juan de Velasco's, written in 1789 and printed in Quito from 1841, and it is not a devil story at all. "El año de 1574 murió Cantuña", Velasco begins, and with his death "se declaró el gran misterio" of the treasure of Atahualpa and Huayna Cápac, buried by Rumiñahui. Cantuña was the small son of Hualca, one of Rumiñahui's men; crushed under a burning house and left for dead, he survived disfigured, was taken in by a Spanish captain, and years later repaid him with Inca gold from a secret cellar fitted with smelting tools. Hauled before a court to explain his wealth, he said he had signed his soul over to the devil in his own blood. That, writes Velasco, was "una célebre ficción", and it worked because "los españoles de aquel tiempo creían firmemente que los indianos tenían trato familiar con el demonio". Friars queued up to exorcise him; he laughed at them and went on giving alms, because "en realidad era buen cristiano, y sumamente devoto de los Dolores de la Santísima Virgen". So neither of the two oldest written versions has a building contract, an army of demons raising an atrium overnight, or a stone hidden at cockcrow. Those three arrive together and late. Rina Artieda devoted a book to them (Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2020): she reads the story every Quito schoolchild now learns as a twentieth-century adaptation of a European legend, spread by a journalist, which turned Velasco's shrewd and vindicated Cantuña into a subordinate. Ecuadorian cultural journalism reporting her work names the journalist as Luis Aníbal Sánchez and dates the retelling to 1947. Neither Artieda's full text nor Sánchez's book could be opened for this page, so that last link is given on their authority and not on mine.

The church and convent of San Francisco occupy the west side of the Plaza de San Francisco in Quito's historic centre, at Cuenca 477 and Sucre. The plaza and the stepped atrium in front of the façade are public open space at any hour, and the atrium is where the missing stone is supposed to be — so the free part of the visit is the part the legend is about. The church is a working parish and is normally open free of charge outside services, roughly Monday to Saturday from 09:00 to 17:30, with Sunday masses at several times. Confirm before travelling: hours here move with restoration work and with the liturgical calendar. The paying visit is the Museo Franciscano Fray Pedro Gocial, inside the convent. Quito's municipal museum system lists it as open Monday to Sunday, 09:00 to 17:00, with admission for Ecuadorians at 4 USD for adults, 2 USD for students and seniors and 1 USD for children, and 6 USD for foreign visitors; the telephone given is (02) 295 2911. Prices and hours were checked in August 2026 and are worth re-checking. The ticket covers seven exhibition rooms, the choir, the bell towers and the cloisters — and the cloisters are where Cantuña's burial slab of 1669 is, set into the east wall of the main cloister a few metres from the museum door. It is the one thing on this page you can go and put your hand on. The Capilla de Cantuña opens off the south end of the atrium and holds Bernardo de Legarda's main altarpiece; access varies and is often through the convent circuit rather than its own door. Quito sits at about 2,850 m: arrive slowly. The plaza is busy, uneven, and known for pickpockets after dark.