Plano del Virreynato del Perù

Map of the Viceroyalty of Peru, made by the cosmographer Andrés Baleato in the year 1792. Its relevance lies in the fact that its author clearly defined the political limits of the Viceroyalty of Peru: according to this demarcation, Baleato specified that the district and desert of Atacama belonged to the Intendancy of Potosí, which was integrated into the Viceroyalty of Buenos Aires. He wrote that the confines of the Viceroyalty of Peru were: “to the south, the great Atacama desert that separates the Intendancy of Arequipa from those of the Kingdom of Chile”, which is why this map is frequently mentioned in Peru to justify its territorial and historical right over the provinces of Tacna and Arica. This plan is very scarce and we have no sale record of it in the last fifty years. It appeared in the “Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Virreynato del Perú para el año de 1797. Compuesta de órden del Superior Gobierno por el Doctor Don Joseph Hipólito Unánue, Catedrático de Anatomía en la Real Universidad de San Marcos”. It indicates the intendancies into which the Viceroyalty is divided, which are: Lima, Trujillo, Arequipa, Tarma, Huancavelica, Guamanga and Cuzco; as well as the districts that make up each of them. In 1813, the cosmographer Baleato also prepared the Apuntes sobre las divisiones política y natural del Virreynato del Perú, which he likewise made at the request of the viceroy. Andrés Baleato was a pilot of the Royal Spanish Navy and the first master and interim director of the Royal Academy of Nautics of Lima. He served for 32 years in the Viceroyalty of Peru, to which he arrived in 1790 as part of the retinue of the new viceroy Francisco Gil de Taboada y Lemos, who had entrusted him with the functions of training pilots and drawing up plans of the kingdom. It was thus that he carried out important cartographic works, among which is the Plano del Virreynato del Perú, produced at the request of the viceroy, as well as a series of plans of the Intendancies into which the viceroyalty was divided. Both the production of this map and its inclusion and publication in the Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Virreynato del Perú respond to a desire for knowledge and to a concern to acquire a firm and global idea of Peru for its better government; ideas that responded to the Enlightenment spirit of the late 18th century. This Guide offered, in its great universe of information, a vision of the economic, educational, demographic and cartographic reality of the viceroyalty.