The Treasures of Catalina Huanca

In the founding text nobody buries anything. Ricardo Palma wrote the tradición in 1876 and printed it in Lima in 1877, and in it the treasure is not hidden by Catalina Huanca at all: it is shown to a penniless Dominican parish priest by his own indigenous sexton, who blindfolds him and walks him down into a lit gallery of gold idols on silver scaffolds and silver bars strewn on the floor. The sexton then vanishes, the priest convinces himself he has dealt with the devil, and dies of it. The only place Palma locates a hoard is a cellar under Catalina's house in San Jerónimo de Tunán, where he says people were already digging in his own lifetime. Everything else came afterwards and happened in Lima: a presidential decree, state machinery on the cerro de San Bartolomé between 1930 and 1933, a 484-page book of occult revelations in 1972, and a name that now belongs to a pre-Hispanic pyramid in Ate and to a zinc mine in Ayacucho. Under all of it there is a real, documented woman, and she is the better story.

The Mantaro valley — the "valley of Jauja" of the colonial paperwork — was divided into three repartimientos, Hatun Xauxa, Lurin Huanca and Hanan Huanca, each with its own principal curaca: the Surichaqui, the Guacrapáucar-Limaylla and the Apoalaya. Their wealth is not folklore. Working in the Archivo Regional de Junín, the historian Carlos H. Hurtado Ames published the inventory of the mayorazgo of don Carlos de Apoalaya, principal curaca of Hanan Huanca and Hatun Xauxa: more than seventy properties by the end of the seventeenth century — estancias, haciendas, obrajes, chorrillos, solares and houses in every town of the valley. In March 1688 Apoalaya's will split all of it between his two daughters, Theresa and Petrona, because he had no son. Theresa de Apoalaya held the curacazgos of Hanan Huanca and Hatun Xauxa for decades and died intestate; the appraisal of her estate, filed in the Archivo Regional de Junín in September 1731, values it at 121,070 pesos de a ocho reales. The name Catalina Huanca appears in none of those transactions. What Hurtado Ames did find is one striking document: the Expediente de Títulos Originales of the community of Huamanmarca, in the district of Huayucachi, south of Huancayo, signed on 5 June 1714, in which "la muy poderosa señora Catalina Guanca" acts as procuradora of the ayllus — at a moment when the principal curaca of the valley was Theresa de Apoalaya. In 2001 he read this as evidence that Catalina Huanca was Theresa's alias. He later hardened the reading: the abstract of his 2015 study of the documents of 1712-1715 calls them apocryphal, drawn up out of the need to legitimise the holdings of the communities south of Huancayo, for whom this lady was "the owner of everything". The story as everyone knows it was written by Ricardo Palma in 1876 and printed the next year in the fourth series of his Tradiciones (Benito Gil, Lima); it is number 105 in Merlin D. Compton's chronological list of the tradiciones, where it carries the singular title "El tesoro de Catalina Huanca". It travelled under the plural title in the Montaner y Simón edition (Barcelona, 1894). Palma's Catalina is the daughter of the Huanca curaca, baptised with Francisco Pizarro as her godfather; she gives tiles and timber worth a hundred thousand pesos ensayados for the church and convent of San Francisco in Lima, endows the royal caja de censos so that seven villages can pay part of their tribute, and founds the custom by which the blind of those villages are clothed and fed at each patron saint's feast. She travels to Lima in a silver litter with three hundred escorts and brings down fifty pack animals loaded with gold and silver; she dies under the viceroy marqués de Guadalcázar at nearly ninety. Palma never says she buried anything. He asks three questions — was it rent paid by the administrators of her mines? was it a hoard accumulated over centuries by her ancestors? — and answers only that the second "was the general belief". Two-thirds of the tradición are about somebody else. Around 1642 the Dominican parish priest of San Jerónimo, unable to pay for the reception of the visitor whom archbishop Pedro de Villagómez had just appointed, is approached at night by his sexton, an old indigenous man who "could barely carry the weight of his own baptismal record". Blindfolded and walked through the sleeping village, the priest goes down a stair into a lit gallery with gold idols on silver scaffolds and silver bars strewn on the floor, and is told to take what he needs. The visitation is a triumph. Then the sexton vanishes, the priest wastes away convinced he has dealt with the devil, and dies; Palma says a deathbed declaration survives in the archive of the friars of Ocopa. Only the closing lines put a treasure anywhere: the people of San Jerónimo believe it lies in a cellar under Catalina's house, and "even in our own times" excavations have been made there — to keep the silver bars from rusting. Everything else is later, and it happened in Lima. The search settled on the cerro de San Bartolomé, beside El Agustino. In 1930 Luis Sánchez Cerro, then president of the military junta, authorised excavations there and issued Suprema Resolución 649 declaring any hidden treasure the exclusive property of the State; he resumed the work after returning to power by election, and it stopped only when he was shot dead on 30 April 1933, after which Óscar R. Benavides had it wound up. Nothing was found. In 1972 general Alejandro Barco López published a 484-page book, Los tesoros de Pachacámac y Catalina Huanca, moving the origin of the hoard to the sanctuary of Pachacámac; Hurtado Ames notes that Barco states the information was revealed to him by clairvoyant, occultist "aukis", and that Barco identifies as many as five different Catalinas Huanca across the colonial period. Other candidates have been argued since: Catalina Huanca Acopacha, whose testament Waldemar Espinoza Soriano published and who died in 1653; Catalina Yaruncho, wife of the Hanan Huanca cacique Carlos Apoalaya; and Theresa Apoalaya, defended at book length by Aquilino Castro Vásquez in 2005. Two things carry her name today and neither is a treasure. In the Lima district of Ate stands the archaeological site of Catalina Huanca, where Erik Maquera and Milagros Esteban excavated mounds 6 and 7 between 2006 and 2008: a public centre of the Lima society planned around AD 550, rebuilt to the same architectural plan for a century and a half, buried around AD 700-750 after episodes of human sacrifice, and reused after AD 750 as a cemetery for populations associated with the Wari phenomenon. It is more than a thousand years older than any Catalina; tradition only says she rested there on the way down from the sierra. And in the district of Canaria, province of Víctor Fajardo, Ayacucho, at 3,500 m, there is the Catalina Huanca mine — a modern polymetallic operation for zinc, lead, silver and copper, described in exactly those terms by its own geologists at the XVII Peruvian Geological Congress in 2014.

Cerro San Bartolomé, in the Lima district of El Agustino (around 12.0497 S, 76.9900 W), is where the State dug. It is not a monument and there is nothing laid out to see: the slope is covered by housing, there is no signage, no interpretation and no visitor access to any tunnel. Treat it as somebody's neighbourhood rather than a site, ask before photographing, and do not go looking for shafts — the ground there is precisely the ground that has been undermined. The places you can actually stand in are the ones Palma attributed to her. The Basílica y Convento de San Francisco, in the historic centre of Lima, keeps the tiled cloister; the thing to look at is the inscription on the tiles, which names fray Juan Gómez and his Lima benefactors and not a curaca. The parish church of Santa Ana, in Barrios Altos, is what survives of the Hospital de Santa Ana de los Naturales founded by Loayza in 1549; the hospital itself was wound up and its grounds, around the ninth block of jirón Huallaga, were sold off in 1925, its successor being the Hospital Nacional Arzobispo Loayza on avenida Alfonso Ugarte. In the Mantaro valley, San Jerónimo de Tunán (around 11.9490 S, 75.2827 W) is 15 km north of Huancayo and is known today for its silver filigree workshops. Palma writes that "the house of Catalina Huanca" still stood there in his time; I have not been able to confirm that any surviving building is identified as such, and there is no signposted site. The convent of Santa Rosa de Ocopa, 8.5 km away in the province of Concepción at 3,391 m, is open every day except Tuesdays from 09:00 to 17:00 with a midday closure, at S/ 10 for adults, S/ 5 for university students, S/ 3 for schoolchildren and S/ 2 for children aged four to nine, and holds a library of more than thirty thousand volumes including fifteenth-century incunabula — whether the dying priest's declaration Palma cites is among them is unverified. The archaeological site of Catalina Huanca, in the Lima district of Ate, cannot simply be visited: it lies inside the concession of a private sand quarry and access requires the company's permission. Writing in El Comercio in 2014, Roxanne Cheesman described what is left of it standing on a cliff-edged mound of sand, with funerary bundles and red Lima-culture vessels exposed. The Catalina Huanca mine in Canaria, Ayacucho, is a working industrial operation and is not a heritage attraction of any kind.