What is it like to go from success to ruin? It can happen at any moment, due to a misfortune or a bad decision. In the case of our character, Juan landin Gómez de Zavala, were both reasons.
But losing everything did not prevent him from leaving a legacy in Saltillo. A chapel that has survived more than 245 years and the surname of his family as the name of the Landín neighborhood, located to the southeast of the city.
He was a businessman, a merchant. In charge of verifying the system of weights and measures in shops.
He was born in Spain. When he got to the Villa of Santiago del Saltillo in 1739 he was not rich, but three decades later he was already one of the most influential and wealthy subjects.
Let us remember that at that time what is now Mexico was governed by Spain. It was common for Europeans to come here to do life, business and be wealthy.
A tax review conducted in 1777found that the most valuable property that Juan Landín had was a chapel that he had built years before.
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Current view of the Landín chapel to the southeast of the city.
Made with adobe, quarry front and carved, the construction was located on his country estate called the Immaculate Conception, located in the current Landín neighborhood.
Until today, we find it at the corner of Periférico Luis Echeverría and Manuel de Mederos street. This place has been a museum and a Public Library.
In the lands surrounding the chapel there was also a house, houses for workers, a market, a fountain and fruit trees. Juan referred to this entire complex as “La Haciendita”.
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With old age, the decline
John was married twice. His first wife died and seven years later he married a second time.
In the 1790s, continuous droughts hit the region and with it the economy of the haciendas.
This forced the Landíns to move to San Juan Bautista del Ornandillo, further south of the town of Saltilla. There was more water available there than in “The Ranch”.
By this time Juan was already an older adult and suffered from diseases. His time of success had stayed with the yesterdays.
Ruin accompanied him in old age. In addition to being affected by the drought, in his role as a trader, Landín made bad decisions that tilted him more towards losses than gains.
The family’s livelihood depended on growing grain in the Ornadillo. But Juan had to use that income to pay a debt he took on with a Mexican grocer.
Juan Landín died in 1797 in Saltillo. One of his sons was a priest and died in 1813. To measure the economic situation of the family, when that son died “he did not test because he was poor”. This is how the parish priest Pedro Fuentes explained it in his death certificate.
The second wife and a daughter who survived Juan Landín, in order to support themselves, began to sell the objects and properties they had left. Then they left Saltillo.
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That chapel built in the Immaculate Conception was already abandoned, not to say that it was falling apart. More than 200 years passed before it was seized and restoration began.
The features of the chapel’s façade have been compared to those of the Saltillo Cathedral.
But about the myths and historical confusion that have surrounded this enclosure, whose architectural features have come to be compared with those of the Cathedral of Santiago, we have to talk in another edition of Historias de Saltillo.
*With information from María Elena Santoscoy, Carlos Recio and the Municipal Archive of Saltillo.
