The Reign of Spain

Four decades isn’t all that much to a city that’s currently celebrating its three hundredth birthday. And two massive fires toward the end of Spain’s forty-year reign over New Orleans (1763–1803) did their best to erase what roots the ruling country had managed to put down in that time. (856 buildings burned in The Great New Orleans Fire of 1788; 212 buildings were lost to a 1794 fire.) The Cabildo, the Spanish colonial city hall, was one such building to go up in smoke in 1788, but it was rebuilt from 1795–99. While Spain left New Orleans behind shortly thereafter, the Cabildo still stands in Jackson Square: there, Louisiana officially became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase transfer in 1803. In 1896, the Louisiana Supreme Court sat in the Cabildo and established “separate but equal” with Plessy v. Ferguson (upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and later weakened by such decisions as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954). The Louisiana State Museum took control of the Cabildo in 1908 and still has that responsibility today. 

Now a new exhibition at the Cabildo will explore Spanish influence in New Orleans as well as on American culture as a whole. Recovered Memories: Spain, New Orleans, and the Support for the American Revolution will span 7,000 square feet of the recently renovated Cabildo. “Anyone that visits the Cabildo from here on out will see a completely renovated museum that is pretty spectacular,” said Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser.

The exhibition, which debuted at the Cabildo on April 21 and will remain on view until July 8, includes Spanish weapons; the original 1769 broadside from Governor Alejandro O’Reilly that asserted Spain’s hold on colonial Louisiana; portrait paintings of colonial governors Antonio de Ulloa and Bernardo de Galvéz by José Salazar; and Francisco de Goya’s, “The Swing,” on loan from Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. “There are so many artifacts that will be here that will never be back from Spain,” said Nungesser. Visit louisianastatemuseum.com/museum/cabildo for more details.

This article originally appeared in our May 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.