At the end of the Ignacio Bañuelos Cabezud alley (former Muelle street), intersect Carlos M. Esque-rro or Mutualismo street in front of a fallow block where there is a double-height wall with very wide walls that belonged to the facade of emblematic commerce in the city known as LA CASA RU-FFO which is protected by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) for being a building from the 19th century after the fire in 2006.
 

    In the middle of the nineteenth century, the streets of La Paz were known by the surnames of well-known families or local merchants, for example, the current Esquerro or Mutualismo street was
known as “Navarro-Vives-Smith” street, which with the cadastral reform of In 1886, the City Council of La Paz named it Comercio Street; Agustín Arriola street was known as “Ruiz-Amao” street, which was assigned the name of Puerto street; Mijares alley was known as “La Espina” alley while Lerdo street had that name since the 19th century. These streets formed a large block of irregular outlines that before 1886 was registered in the cadastre with the letter "F" but with the quoted cadastral reform it was assigned the number 9.
 

     Everything indicates that in 1829 Don Antonio Ruffo of Spanish ancestry, born in 1803, and Doña Josefa Santacruz of Peruvian ancestry arrived at the La Paz port. When they arrived, their first dau-ghter Esperanza Ruffo Santa Cruz was born in Acapulco and the rest of their children were born in La Paz: Carmen, Adelaida, Soledad, Carolina, Francisco de Paula, Octaviano, and Antonio Justo Ruffo Santa Cruz.
 

    Antonio Justo Ruffo Santa Cruz, who was born in 1841, married Ernestina Polastri, born in 1858 and their children were Ernestina, Raúl Aquiles Porfirio, Roberto, Enrique Josefina, Beatriz Constanza and Antonio Ruffo Polastri.
 

     Antonio Ruffo Polastri, born in 1884; married Teresa Azcona Bustamante in 1923 and their children were Agustín, Eduardo, Guillermo, María Teresa and Antonio Ruffo Azcona.
 

     It has been documented that Don Antonio Justo Ruffo Santa Cruz established at the beginning of the 1860s a store that the people of La Paz at that time knew as LA CASA RUFFO located in the former Comercio street between the former Puerto street and Lerdo street. As the date of cons-truction of the monumental two-story building is unknown, it is thought that it was completed in 1893 because that date was engraved along with the letter “AR” (Initial of Antonio Ruffo) in an or-nament in the form of a cartouche that is located in one of the arches of the building.

    It should be highlighted that the economic history of La Paz can not be explained without these four generations of the Ruffo family in the city's trade and shipping agencies; in this way, the 19th-cen-tury building of LA CASA RUFFO and afterward LA PERLA DE LA PAZ, it might be said that it represents the symbol of economical power in La Paz for more than a century since it maintained the hegemony in the second half of the 19th century and up to the second third of the 20th century, losing its hegemony at the time when the local market had the increasing presence of large national and global commercial capitalist companies, despite attempts to commercially modernize LA PERLA DE LA PAZ and introduce the new commercial model for the city with the establishment of CENTRO COMERCIAL CALIFORNIANO [Californian Commercial Center] (CCC) in 1969 which is currently owned by Chedraui group.
 

     In the original building from the 19th century, the store, a bank, a shipping agency, and other com-mercial agencies were operating for more than a century. It is a monumental building with a facade of eclectic architecture, although the neoclassical style is dominant, built with exact symmetry:
 

     In the central part of the facade on the first floor there are five openings in the form of french-windows with their respective lowered arches framed in the shape of a boss, the one of which is located in the center, serves as an entrance to the building, while on its sides two large wooden access gates were surely used to unload the goods, similar to the previous ones, that means, lo-wered arches framed in the shape of a boss and with a cartouche that embellishes the keystone of the arch bent towards the soffit with the engraved years of 1893 and 1907 and the twined letters “A” and “R”. In the middle of the five central lowered arches, there are six bolstered pilasters at-tached to the wall in the shape of a boss that ends in six volute-shaped corbels and ribbed sides that support a continuos cornice which in turn serves as a balcony with a cast-iron railing; there are four more corbels, two on each gate that holds two balconies from its endings.
 

     In the central part of the upper floor facade, there are five semicircular arches with semicircular decorations on the voussoirs and a cartouche decorated in the keystone of each arch; while on its sides there are two semicircular arches on each side that coincide with the width of the gate, alto-gether nine arches, at the height of the keystone of each arch in the central part and the adjoined columns, there are a total of twenty corbels similar to those on the first floor that support a cornice along with the facade; while at the top of the roof, there is a balustrade separated by nine short columns that support nine spheres.
 

     At the south ending of the facade, a third floor rises on the roof where the staircase of the building is certainly placed, having its facade by three french-windows with lowered arches, one of them, the central one, wider; above them a continuous cornice and in the upper part a balustrade similar to the one on the roof of the second floor.
 

     In the first decades of the 20th century, the two-story building on the corner formed by the former Puerto and Comercio streets was built. It was in 1911 when a commercial company called LA PERLA DE LA PAZ was formalized, which was notarized in 1925 by Don Antonio Ruffo Polastri. In that year, 1911, permission was obtained to install a pharmacy and the corresponding authorization to sell patent medicine, which was installed in the two-story building on the corner of the old Comercio and Puerto streets; a building with neoclassical architectural elements on the facade, with no de-corations and arches. On the first floor where was placed the pharmacy known by the city inhabi-tants as "La Botica de Ruffo"(Ruffo's Apothecary), it had vertical rectangular french-windows framed with a molding that rises above the top of the frame similar to the cornice. In the corner, there was a rounded column attached that stands out with a neoclassical capital that stands out from the continuing cornice along with the building and underneath a continuous plinth with no moldings; while on the upper floor there were a series of rectangular vertical windows framed with a molding that protrudes in the upper part of the frame and above them, along with the building, another continuous molding, a parapet and a continuous cornice with a curved topping guardrail towards the corner.
 

     LA PERLA DE LA PAZ building set on fire in 2006. That left standing only the walls and old facades from the 19th and 20th centuries that could have been preserved for an eventual reconstruction but they were demolished and nowadays solely the wall of the facade of the XIX century remains.
 

 

La Paz, Baja California Sur, March 28, 2020.
 

​

 

URBAN HISTORY DOCUMENTATION CENTER
[CENTRO DE DOCUMENTACIÓN DE HISTORIA URBANA]