Bello penned this poem after the 1841 fire that had damaged the Iglesia de la Compañía. The poem was republished in the press after the 1863 tragedy.

For more on Bello’s life, see Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2001) by Iván Jaksić, and Vida de Don Andrés Bello (1882) by Miguel Luis Amunátegui (Bello’s primary biographer from the nineteenth century).

“El incendio de la Compañía” (1841)