The town of El Morro, its famous church, the guasango tree and the ‘pueta’ Santos Cacao

By Sergio Cedeno Amador *

El Morro is today a ghost town located in the desert area 80 km from Guayaquil and close to the sea with about 5,000 inhabitants.

According to my friend, the historian José Villón Torres, this town with fresh water wells, a huge and famous albarrada or lagoon and extensive grasslands It was founded in 1654 by 70 Chanduy Indians. dedicated to livestock and who fled their Chanduy town due to the permanent drought that affected that area.

In 1737, the Indians asked “Your Mercy” King Philip V to grant them ownership of these lands, which they achieved by paying the monarch 500 gold pesos, and the same year they begin the construction of their famous and beautiful wooden church with a tiled roof, dedicated to San Jacinto de Cracovia, and one of the last colonial vestiges of the Coast of Ecuador, which is today a cultural and tourist heritage.

As a child, when we used to spend family vacations in the solitary resort of Data de Posorja, very close to El Morro, we used to visit this bucolic and dusty town with very old bamboo cane houses and tile roofs, where the festivities of its patron San Jacinto were famous, on August 15, in which “castles and mad cows” were burned with fireworks, the church bells rang “at full throttle” and “hot bread” was sold from the Consuegra bakery, the only one in town.

But what caught my attention the most was seeing the innumerable and docile “pure Creole cows” originating in Spain and still without crosses of Cebu cattle; dairy cows that are now extinct and that made the “moorish butter” famous, which was sometimes given to important visitors in a “potty pan” that they said was new and well washed… but that could later be used for the known purpose, since “you don’t look a gift horse in the tooth”.

I never forget either the famous and abundant guasango trees (Loxopterigium huasango), native people from that area, that popular culture reported that not even the snakes came near him and that the man who climbed this tree would stay “fluffy” for several days, but that his good side was that, If a lady did not accept the suitor, he took her under the guasango, told her a verse and she accepted it quickly!

It was famous at the beginning of the 20th century and until today the “Pueta morreño” Santos Cacao, descendant of one of the founding Indians of the town, Agustín Cacao, the same one who wandered through all the towns on the seashore in the province of Guayas, launching his couplets and verses and whom I would have liked to accompany on his tours…

They say that Don Cacao was “persistent and avid in skirt matters”, That’s why old cholos always repeat their favorite couplet by the sea:

when i see a brunette

I’m leaving half a lao

as er hawk ar chicken

like the heron fishing. (I)

* Member of the National Academy of History and proud montuvio.