Administration Square History

On Millet’s plan (1881) a single block alley without name appears, between the Governor’s building and the City council. However, in 1860 it is a small square in which open-air band concerts are organized on Thursdays and Sundays, for its strategic location between the most representative symbols in local power. It is also a favorable place for the commercial exchange, for the vicinity with the municipal market and its proximity to the pier.

The change from the anonymous small square to the modern square took place in the XX century. The entrance of new technologies such as the tram and the electric illumination, favored the idea of erecting a monument to Antonio José of Sucre - originally born in 1889 -.

It was officially inaugurated on October 8, 1911. The monument and Sucre Square became an attractive walkway full of benches and streetlights, surrounded in oval form by a forge iron fence from whose location the Guayas river could be observed.

The current Administration Square has become the most important central square in Guayaquil, not only as power image, but as referral to the efficient organization of the urban physical space.

To this it is necessary to add the effort to keep alive the historical memory, by means of the oval traced on the floor that suggests the line of the original fence and the exact place where the statue was located, reinserted now in an environment of more visual wealth.

by: Ángel Emilio Hidalgo, Historian.