In a book written during the Colony, the mayor of Quito, Toribio de Ortiguera, describes the eruption of that year of the "frightful volcano and mouth of fire that is near the city of Quito". Follow the parts about the arrival to the top and crater of 4,791 meters:

... Eager to see by sight of eyes such a strange thing and where the cause of it came from, the graduate Francisco de Auncíbar determined ... to see him personally. He asked with determination to say Mass there, Don Alonso de Aguilar, priest of the holy cathedral church of Quito, and Juan Sánchez Miño ... to Captain Juan de Galarza ... to Captain Juan de Londoño and Toribio de Ortiguera, who is the one who writes this relationship, besides which were many other Spaniards and Indians and Indians, blacks, blacks of service. We left Quito Saturday after noon, July twenty-eighth of the 82nd ... the next day Sunday ... we climbed the hill on foot because it was very rough and with terrible rocks, all covered in ash, snow and ice, with air so cold that it blinded us with ash and very cold... Arrived we went to the mouth of the volcano or mouth of fire, because there was no thing that prevented it, we saw it, and it is in this way: that it is in a hill, the highest and scarred of all there is in all that circuit, in the middle of which is the spacious hole in which there will apparently be more than five hundred states of depth and in the beginning and round the mouth will have a league of a circle. .. This mouth has a strange annoyance: that with having in the depths and depths of her fire and the fumes that have been seen, at the beginning and high of her it is so terrible cold and in such a way that none of the priests were able to say mass ...

Guagua Pichincha History

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