El Señor Presidente

Asturias never names the capital, but its cathedral, its central plaza and the presidential palace on the plaza's edge make it unmistakably Guatemala City, drawn from the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera in the early 1900s. The map runs from the cathedral porch where beggars shelter, across the plaza to the seat of power, down to the prison and the poor quarters, and out to the hill where the land breaks toward the mountains and the border.

Miguel Cara de Ángel

The cathedral porch, the Portal del Señor

Part One

The novel opens at night in the arcade beside the cathedral, where the city's beggars bed down. A colonel who torments them is killed there, and the regime seizes on the death to frame two innocent men. The Metropolitan Cathedral on the central plaza anchors the porch Asturias calls the Portal del Señor.

Part One, chapters 1-2

explicit The capital is never named, but its cathedral is real and unmistakable; this marks the Metropolitan Cathedral on the east side of the central plaza, whose arcaded porch stands in for the novel's Portal del Señor.

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Miguel Cara de Ángel

The central plaza, Plaza de la Constitución

Part One

The plaza is the stage on which the regime performs itself: patrols, informers and the fear that binds the city together. Everything in the book radiates from this square, the historic Plaza Mayor at the heart of Guatemala City.

Part One

explicit The city is unnamed, but the great plaza ringed by cathedral, palace and arcades is Guatemala City's Plaza Mayor, today the Plaza de la Constitución or Parque Central.

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