Search results for: "niche"

One aspect I forgot to mention was that there is full-size church inside the San Lazaro Cemetery in La Antigua Guatemala which I believe goes by the same name. There are some niches in the church façade, just like in many churches around Antigua Guatemala.

No, I don’t think you were thinking about this niche market. Although these kind of niches are the origin for the concept of niche market. Well, the play on words may not work completely in English as it does in Spanish. Nicho is the Spanish term for niche and it applies to the market place, to an architectural recess, a niche can be applied to a hollow, crack, crevice, or foothold, and from there to hollow structured pictured above to receive the dead.

JM Magaña, La Antigua Guatemala’s second conservator and the pen behind the architecture column in Recrearte Magazine, pointed out that until 1976 La Antigua Guatemala was painted all white too. At the time the cemetery was created in the 1800s, there were a couple waves of plagues and thus every thing was white-washed with live limestone to disinfect and maintain the town virus free. This coincided with the introduction of coffee in 1875 (more or less) and thus an abundance of wealth which provided the necessary fund to build all those mausoleums. There was a massive earthquake that hit Guatemala in 1976 and destroyed a great deal of buildings and houses in Guatemala. In fact, it is said that the 1976 earthquake changed forever the look and feel of Guatemala. La Antigua Guatemala was not saved and thus reconstruction began after the quake and with it, the color lime-stone paint came. This change in color did not reach the cemetery.