“Do you know who Luis Felipe Jaspe is?” Juan Carlos Lecompte asks the question urgently as he walks and greets with Caribbean confidence through the streets of the historic center of Cartagena de Indias, inside and outside its famous walls, a World Heritage Site. The scene is equally repeated if your interlocutor on duty is a tour guide, the doorman of a listed building or a lottery salesman. Since the answer is usually negative, he immediately claims the infamous mark left by the work of his great-great-grandfather, who created several of the city's most important landmarks, such as the iconic Clock Tower (from 1888) and the Heredia Theater (1911). ). ), which is preparing to host a new edition of the Hay Festival in January.
Juan Carlos Lecompte, in the bell tower.CHELO CAMACHO
Jaspe (1846-1918), an artist, architect, landscape designer, painter and urban planner with very long mustaches forgotten by the citizens, is to Cartagena what Antoni Gaudí is to Barcelona, defends Lecompte without complexes, promoting a series of Initiatives to restore his figure from the hands of the tourism group. He argues that both were contemporaries and representatives of Romanticism, a few years apart. He began conceiving the project five years ago when he lived in Barcelona and observed how Gaudí was idolized there, “here in Cartagena, no one knows who Jaspe is,” although everyone knows the great symbols he created. “I want to promote Cartagena because this Cartagena native enabled Cartagena to leap into modernity and free it from the lethargy in which it found itself for much of the 19th century. I think it represents us, it can unite us as a society and give the people of Cartagena like the Catalans a sense of belonging.”
The Heredia Theater, officially the Adolfo Mejía Theater, designed by Luis Felipe Jaspe.CHELO CAMACHO
The Romantic period in Cartagena was characterized by its eclectic spirit, within a stylistic mix that mixed Renaissance, Gothic, Baroque, Neoclassic and Mudejar styles, explains Lecompte, an architect dedicated to advertising and in the researched his ancestor in recent years. It's an assembly architecture, he claims. The “La Cartagena de Jaspe” project, already underway, is considering the creation of a route that passes through its buildings, parks and sculptures, as well as the training of guides. Other types of commemorations and exhibitions also include his painterly work, much of which is housed in the National Museum of Bogotá.
Among the many milestones of this route, which Lecompte follows with enthusiasm, is the Ermita del Cabrero, with neo-Gothic influence, in the first quarter that developed outside the city walls. There are the remains of Rafael Núñez, who was president of Colombia four times, and his wife Soledad Román. Also the Manga Cemetery, a neighborhood designed by Jaspe himself and where his mausoleum is located. Other attractions include the Clock Tower itself, the Camellón de los Mártires and the Centenario Park, as well as the Plaza de Bolívar or the Recoletos Monastery of San Diego. His greatest work, the Municipal Market, no longer stands, as it gave way to the Congress Center in the Bahía de las Ánimas in 1978.
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A man walks in front of the Heredia Theater in Cartagena.CHELO CAMACHO
Jaspe was self-taught and obsessed with symmetry, octagonal shapes and arches. He had the ability to look for architectural solutions that responded to the historical moment in which he lived. Cartagena has a colonial past that is heavy and obvious. But his assets are not exhausted during this period. It took most of the rest of the 19th century for the city to recover from the siege of Pablo Morillo, the climax of the Spanish reconquest of 1815, and the civil wars that followed. For decades the place was in decline, to the point that its population declined.
Jasper's work is the representation of late republican architecture in Cartagena. And the crisis that the city experienced in the 19th century shows that it was late, emphasizes historian Javier Ortiz. While Havana has developed a neoclassical, republican architecture that is extremely impressive thanks to the sugar boom, Cartagena still lives with the colonial ruins of the viceregal era, he explains. “When a personality like Luis Felipe Jaspe appears and starts these works, it reflects a certain recovery in the city,” he estimates.
Clock tower, in Cartagena.CHELO CAMACHO
For the Heredia Theater – now called the Adolfo Mejía Theater – built on the structure of an old colonial church that also housed a lighthouse, Jaspe traveled to Havana to get inspiration from the Tacon Theater. He had previously studied at the School of Fine Arts in Martinique, then a French colony. “The interesting thing about all of this is that for a city like Cartagena de Indias, the references to architectural renewal, i.e. to architectural modernity, come from the Caribbean and not through any other route.” This shows once again the historical context,” emphasizes Ortiz. “One cannot understand the political, social and economic changes of Cartagena without referring to this region of the Greater Caribbean,” he adds.
The importance of jaspe is linked to the role it plays in an important moment in the city's history, such as the economic boom that the city experienced at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries after a long lethargy, agrees the historian to Orlando Deavila. , professor at the University of Cartagena. “People identify buildings or monuments as city landmarks, but they don’t know the story behind them or who Luis Felipe Jaspe was,” he explains. “These works are testaments to the spirit of the times, this desire, this striving for modernity, which also had an aesthetic and architectural spirit that Jasper knew how to interpret quite well.” His brand is present, even if his name does not have such a strong resonance at the moment.
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