La catedral perdida

La catedral perdida (The Lost Cathedral) is a documentary edition of twenty-eight primary sources concerning the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in León, Nicaragua, with antecedent materials from the colonial period beginning in 1527. It was edited, translated, and annotated by the Nicaraguan architect Consuelo Vargas Montiel between 1974 and 1978, and first published in a small print run by the Instituto Superior de Estudios Iberoamericanos in Managua. The collection assembles correspondence, notarial records, episcopal inventories, an architect's confession, and a Nahuatl document recovered in 1974 from a sealed compartment in the cathedral's south transept wall, drawn from the Diocesan Archive of León, the Archivo General de Indias, the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, and private holdings. The present digital edition, prepared in 2026 by M. A. Aybar, reproduces the 1976 text in full in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, with minor corrections noted in the errata. The work is a literary fiction in the form of a scholarly documentary edition; readers seeking the bibliographic frame are referred to the colophon.