Iglesia de La Merced stands where most of the colonial capital fell. Its front is lime stucco painted an intense marigold, with every scroll, shell and leaf of the ataurique relief picked out in white — ornament that sits on the wall, casts a real shadow, and stops exactly where the frame begins.

The proportions are the point. Low towers, thick walls, broad flat arches, cornices heavy enough to look load-bearing. Nothing soars, because soaring is what the 1773 earthquakes took down. This system inherits that discipline: dense, framed, warm, and deliberately squat.