Cantuña and the Church of San Francisco

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 chapel took its name from a benefactor. 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." The genealogist Fernando Jurado Noboa, as cited by Rina Artieda, dates his deed with the Franciscans for the chapel and the grave to 1668, Cantuña's will to 1699 and his last recorded activity to 1701. The iron door of the convent gatehouse is his as well; its maker's record reads "Esta obra hizo Don Francisco Cantuña herrero de esta ciudad, acabose en (1)6 de febrero de 1696". 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 has a known model: 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 has no devil at work. "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 dates them to "La tradición de San Francisco", by the journalist Luis Aníbal Sánchez, printed in 1947 by Editorial El Comercio in his Tradiciones y leyendas del Ecuador (pages 100-103), and reads it as an adaptation of the Spanish legend of the Devil's Bridge that turned Velasco's shrewd and vindicated Cantuña into a subordinate. In a note she adds that Sánchez's version is, "hasta el momento", the only one that names the Franciscan atrium as the object of the contract.

The church and convent of San Francisco occupy the west side of the Plaza de San Francisco in Quito's historic centre, on the corner of Cuenca 477 with Sucre. The plaza and the stepped atrium in front of the façade are public open space, and the atrium is where the legend places the missing stone. The Capilla de Cantuña stands at the south end of the convent's main façade, a few metres from the church, with its door on the plaza. Its main altarpiece is the work of the Quito master Bernardo de Legarda, of the eighteenth century. The convent's own site gives the chapel's hours as 09:00 to 17:30 from Monday to Saturday and 09:00 to 12:30 on Sunday, and the telephone as (02) 295 2911. 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 from 09:00 to 17:00. Admission for Ecuadorians is 4 US dollars for adults, 2 for students and older visitors, 1 for children; foreign visitors pay 6, and those figures were still published on 22 September 2026. The ticket covers seven exhibition rooms, the choir, the bell towers and the cloisters. Cantuña's burial slab of 1669 is in the Franciscan cloister. The Instituto Cervantes transcribes its inscription as "Ésta es la sepultura de Francisco Cantuña y sus herederos. Año de 1669". Quito's historic centre stands at about 2,850 metres above sea level.