Iglesia del Calvario, Catholic church in Zone 1, Guatemala City, Guatemala.
Iglesia del Calvario is a neoclassical church building with three naves supported by pillars. The interior features neoclassical-style windows and a floor decorated with black and white geometric patterns.
A straw church sheltered the image of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios from 1776; a definitive church was begun in 1784 on the Cerro del Cielito, blessed on 20 February 1787 and finished in 1789. It survived the 1917–18 earthquakes with the loss of one bell tower. Converted into the Museo de Historia in 1935, the old temple was demolished in 1946 to extend the sixth avenue, after the new church opened in 1932.
The nickname El Calvario comes from the fifty 30-cm steps worshippers had to climb to the old hilltop atrium, paid for by Juan J. González Batres. The image of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios was sheltered here from 1776, and the parish remains one of the most visited in Guatemala City.
The current church, inaugurated in 1932, stands a few metres from where the old Calvario temple stood at the end of Sixth Avenue; the old building was demolished by 1946 to extend that avenue. The fifty-step stairway of thirty-centimetre risers that once led up to the old atrium on the Cerro del Cielito no longer exists, so access today is at street level.
The old Calvario stood atop the Cerro del Cielito, reached by a fifty-step stairway 30 cm high per step, built over an area of 8 by 50 metres and paid for by Juan J. González Batres. Parishioners nicknamed it El Calvario because the climb was so hard. The 1917-18 earthquakes destroyed much of the city but only cost the church one bell tower.
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