Stone Recycling

Good building stones are hard to come by -- they are heavy and take a lot of work to prepare.  And they don't generally wear out.  Prime candidates for recycling.

Mérida had 5 stone pyramids in 1500, before los conquistadores arrived.  We don't know exactly what they looked like since nobody took a photograph.  By 1600, Mérida had zero pyramids but a new cathedral, a house for the family of top conquistador, a house for the governor, and a big town hall forming the borders of a central town square.

So, it seems the sacred stones of the pyramids became the sacred stones of the cathedral (and the secular stones of some other nice real estate).  Lot of hard work involved, and my guess is the conquistadors took mainly a supervisory role.  And I get the impression that fair wages were not a consideration.

Today, once a week the faces of the cathedral and of the conquistador house serve as screens for amazing light shows.  The shows are beautiful, technically tough (they have to have really tight registration of the laser projection on the features of the walls), historically informative and kind of spiritually uplifting. 

From the show "Sacred Stones", projected on the cathedral.