San Blas, the quiet edge of the Old Town
Most visitors to Quito walk past San Blas without registering it. They are walking past the point where, for three and a half centuries, the city stopped — and where the road to the Amazon began. It is still, in a sense, doing the same job.
The short version
- The parish was founded in 1568, and its church is among the two oldest in Quito.
- It was built for the Indigenous population, which is why its priests had to speak Kichwa.
- Its plaza marked the northern limit of the city until the twentieth century.
- The road east — to Guápulo, Esmeraldas and the Amazon — left from here.
- Today it is the quiet edge of the Old Town: ten minutes from the Plaza Grande, and far enough to sleep.
Founded in 1568, for other people
Thirty-four years after the Spanish founded Quito on the ruins of the Inca city, the parish of San Blas was established on its northern periphery — 17 October 1568. The first church had rammed-earth walls and a thatched roof, with a small cemetery beside it. The stone building you see today came later, in the seventeenth century, and it sits on a rise looking west over its plaza.
Here is the part worth knowing. San Blas, like the other peripheral parishes, was established for the Indigenous population of the city — the church and the cemetery both. Its priests were therefore required to speak Quichua, and one of them, Diego Lobato, was the first mestizo priest ordained in Quito.
So the colonial city had a shape you can still read on a map: Spanish institutions in the centre, and around the edges the parishes where the people who built them were expected to live, worship and be buried. San Blas is that edge. Along with San Sebastián at the opposite end, it is among the oldest churches in the city.
The plaza also carries a darker memory: a plaque beside the church records that the cacique Jumandi, who led the Quijos uprising against Spanish rule in the 1570s, was killed here. It is a small marker in a small square, and almost nobody stops to read it.
The gate of the city
Until the early twentieth century, this plaza was where Quito ended. North of it there were fields — the royal pastures of Iñaquito, now the Alameda park.
It was also the gate. The road east, to Guápulo, down to the valleys, to Esmeraldas and onward to the Amazon, left the city from San Blas. That made it a commercial junction rather than a quiet backwater: by 1694 it had one of the highest concentrations of pulperías — small general stores — of any parish in Quito, and in colonial times it was known for its fruit market. A formal market building, the Mercado Barato, went up on the plaza in 1906 and lasted into the middle of the century.
We think about this more than is probably reasonable, because our own bus to the Cuyabeno leaves from this street at eleven at night. Four hundred and fifty years later, San Blas is still where you set off east from.
What happened to it
An honest neighbourhood history has a difficult middle. Through the second half of the twentieth century San Blas declined, as the wealthier parts of Quito moved north and the Old Town emptied of residents. Traffic, exhaust, cheap liquor and crime gave it a bad name. The municipal library, one of the notable buildings of early twentieth-century Quito, was demolished — still spoken of locally as a real loss.
The recovery began with the restoration of the historic centre and, from 2005, the remodelling of the plaza and the church. What has changed it more is smaller and slower: residents opening galleries, workshops, cafés and small businesses, one door at a time. That process is visibly still going on, which is part of why it feels like a real neighbourhood rather than a restored set.
What is actually here
- The church and plaza of San Blas, remodelled, with a vertical garden and a monument to Hermano Miguel.
- The Basílica del Voto Nacional, five minutes away, with its tortoise and iguana gargoyles. Details here.
- Parque La Alameda, immediately north — the old royal pastures, now a park with a nineteenth-century astronomical observatory in it.
- Calle Antepara, a few minutes away, with the densest run of bars and small restaurants in this part of town. More here.
- The Mercado Central, a short walk, for the best hornado in the city. More here.
- Itchimbía, up the hill to the east, for the best sunrise view of the Old Town.
Why we would stay here
We are biased and you should discount accordingly. But the argument is geographical rather than sentimental.
You are ten minutes on foot from the Plaza Grande, and it is downhill. That matters at 2,850 metres more than it sounds — you walk down into the Old Town in the morning and take a two-dollar taxi back up in the evening, rather than climbing home at the end of a long day.
And you are far enough out to sleep. The centre of the Old Town is loud in the early morning: deliveries, services, buses, the plaza waking up. San Blas is residential enough to be quiet, which matters when you have one night before a 04:30 airport run.
The trade-off, honestly stated: there is less immediately outside your door than in the middle of the centre. If you want to step outside into the postcard, stay on García Moreno. If you want to sleep and walk to it, stay here.
[PENDIENTE — la historia de la casa]
Esta sección la completa el hotel. Debe cubrir: por qué 1914, quién construyó o habitó la casa, qué se conservó en la restauración y qué se tuvo que rehacer, y cualquier detalle arquitectónico que merezca señalarse a un huésped — patios, carpintería, pisos, la fachada. Nada de esto debe inventarse.
What we do here
Reception can point out what you are walking past — the plaque by the church, where the market used to be, which doorways are original. It takes two minutes and it changes a walk to the Plaza Grande from a commute into something else.
Ten minutes from the Plaza Grande, and downhill
Nine rooms in a restored 1914 house on the northern edge of the Old Town, where the city used to end and the road east began. Book direct for our lowest rate.
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Short enough to read on the walk down to the plaza.
