With the exception of the churches, which, though unfinished externally, exhibit in their interior all the gaudy richness of the religion to which they belong, and will be lasting memorials of the pious zeal of the Jesuits, who built the greater part of them, there is nothing remarkable in the style of the public buildings. The old government considered money laid out in beautifying the city as so much thrown away upon the colonists, and the new government has been as yet too poor to do more than has been absolutely necessary; what has been done, however, has been well done, and does credit to the republican authorities.
In their private dwellings there was a wretched want of every comfort, when I first went to the country. With but few exceptions, they were confined to a ground floor; the apartments built _en suite_, without passages, round two or three successive quadrangular courts, called patios, opening into each other; and the whole distribution about as primitive and inconvenient as can be imagined.
The floors of the best rooms were of bricks or tiles, the rafters of the roof seldom hid by a ceiling, the walls as cold as whitewash could make them; whilst the furniture was of the most gaudy, tawdry, North American manufacture: a few highly-coloured French prints, serving, perhaps, to mark the state of the fine arts in South America.
Nothing could be more anti-comfortable to English eyes. In cold weather these cold-looking rooms were heated by braziers, at the risk of choking the inmates with the fumes of charcoal; chimneys, so far from being looked upon as wholesome ventilators, were regarded as certain conductors of wet and cold; and it was not till long after the introduction of them by the European residents had practically proved their safety and superiority over the old Spanish warming-pans, that the natives could be induced to try them. The apprehension that they increased the risk of fire was even without foundation, for never were the habitations of man built of such incombustible materials. The roofs and floors, I have already said, are all of brick, and the few beams which are necessary for supporting the former are of a wood from Paraguay, as hard as teak, and almost as incombustible as the bricks themselves.