Santa Sofía: where it was and what the first soccer field in Lima and all of Peru was like

Peruvian soccer owes its past to this woman.

Sofía Bergmann was a beautiful citizen of Lima who, despite all her fortunes, could not know the noblest: love after death. Her early departure to Paris (1871) inspired her husband, the wealthy businessman of French origin Auguste Dreyfus, to the immense afternoon of eternalizing her and thus erecting a mausoleum in the main entrances of the building where, benefactor of just causes and new millionaire thanks to the guano of our coastline (1), had decided to deliver his most applauded work. It was the year 1872, Peru still troubled, destroyed, by the War with Chile. Auguste Dreyfus did not make calculations to donate the most modern and elegant hospital in Lima with only one condition: that it be called Santa Sofía, in memory of his wife (2).

He had imagined and chosen to manufacture abroad what the mausoleum would be like: a quadrilateral base of granite, a sarcophagus of the same material on a marble foot and guarded by four bronze figures. All this was going to live forever on the corner of block 6 of what is now Grau Avenue, headquarters of the José Pardo Higher Technological Institute. Next to the Guillermo Almenara hospital. After the war, Lima needed only two things: peace and hospitals. In this field both were confused.

A dog with a lemon around his neck threatens to cross the road without respecting the traffic light. People walk quickly, adjusting their masks. Cachina Fashion Center should say the sign right out front, only soot covers it up. What was once the walled Lima, protected against the corsairs of the early 1700s, today is a city of whereabouts with rusty bars that nobody respects. Below is the Vía Expresa Grau, as an example. Here, in some space that memory and archives are responsible for hiding, the first soccer game in Lima was played on August 7, 1892. On the Santa Sofía field, in memoriam of that Lima.

(1) Brief history of the Dreuyfus Contract.

(2) In this free article published in 2004 in the journal Neuro-Psychiatry, Dr. Luis Deza Bringas explains with academic authority the history of the Santa Sofía hospital, “the hospital that never was”. The pdf is hosted at SciELO Peru is a virtual library that includes a selected collection of Peruvian scientific journals.

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Gerardo Álvarez Escalona is a Peruvian historian whose research work precedes the publication of his book From the neighborhood to the stadium (PUCP Publishing Fund, 2021). By the way, a gem of urgent reading. In his undergraduate thesis at UNMSM entitled, “The Diffusion of Soccer in Lima” (2001), updated the first clues about what the court means Hagia Sophia for this sport in the country. “The first Peruvians to practice soccer were young elites who traveled to England to study (whether at school or university), learned the game during their stay and when they returned they began practicing in the country,” he explains. Later, Álvarez Escalona quotes: “Jorge Basadre informs us that a match (as football games were called back then) on the field Hagia Sophia, owned by the Lima Cricket club, formed by English residents in Peru”. The announcement of this meeting was published in up to three newspapers in the capital, in addition to El Comercio: El Nacional, El Callao and La Opinion Nacional. It did not reach the extent of the full-page coverage of the media of these times, hyperbolic headlines, with infographics and heat maps; There were barely three lines in which what is now history was announced: on Sunday, August 7, 1892, the first official soccer match would be played, on the Santa Sofía field. Blessed Sunday.

Hagia Sophia, yesterday and today

(The first soccer field would have been located in what is now block 6 of Grau Avenue)

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Where was the pitch? Hagia SophiaHow well do you remember the poet José Gálvez and the historian Jorge Basadre in their works? Difficult to say exactly: what is now the 6th block of Grau Avenue could be an answer. The city has been transformed and, in this sense, two other places that preserve the initial memory of the most important clubs in Peru have disappeared: Juan de la Coba street and the Cotabambas jirón, where Universitario and Alianza Lima were founded, respectively. Of the first, there is barely a tiled sign that is retweeted from time to time; of the second the name and a neighborhood recently decorated by murals alluding to the foundation.

Although this is just a journalistic article, it is convenient to refer to what Lima was like at the end of 1800, the time of the post-war with Chile: a walled city. According to Juan Bromley in his book The Old Streets of Lima, The first news about the possibility of enclosing Lima with defensive walls “we found it in 1618″. The work —explains the book— was finished in 1686 and had five entrance gates for pedestrians: Callao, Guadalupe, Maravillas, Barbones and Martinete. In 1870, that is, just 22 years before the first game of football registered in Lima, the honorable American businessman Enrique Meiggs was commissioned to tear them down: modernity had arrived in the form of a railway. The fall of these enormous adobe walls, five meters high, which gave the capital a medieval air, revealed the immense farms (or farms) adjoining the historic center such as La Colorada, de Ríos, de Pando, Breña, Forsaken, Lince, Lobatón, La Victoria and Santa Sofía, among others.

That land, which today covers the grounds of the Almenara hospital and the Pardo Technological Institute, which was also occupied by the Chilean army after it entered Lima on the afternoon of January 17, 1881, preserves the memory of the first walls of Peruvian soccer. .

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The August 27, 1892 edition of El Comercio announced a first rematch of that match, played twenty days earlier. It would be played the next day. “The following gentlemen will take part,” the brief note said: limeños: Denegri, Dawkins, Cooper, Biggs, Wilson, Prentices, Polis, Tenaud, Hamilton, Brooke, Nugent, Lloyd, Mc Kay, Bernales y Wafieham. Chalacos: Conder, Cowan, Watson, Foord, Jolly, Vowell, Pearson, Mc Munin, Crease, Borune, Gray, Morant, Courage, Mc Kay, M. Muck. Probably English citizens living in Peru: still, no Fernández, no Villanueva, no Cubillas. Long-legged blond and red men in shorts. Some advanced. On Sunday, September 11, also in 1892, the third and last rematch of the classic between Lima and Chalacos of that season would have been played, in the pampón de Santa Sofía. “It is not unnecessary to add —explains the press article— that the entrance is free”.

Football, like now, had to be for everyone.

SOURCES: El Comercio Historical Archive; From the neighborhood to the stadium: Identity and spectacle in Peruvian soccer, by Gerardo Álvarez Escalona (PUCP, 2021); Santa Sofía: the hospital that never was, by Dr. Luis Deza Bringas (Rev. de Neuro-Psiquiat. 2004; 67); That goal exists, by Aldo Panfichi (editor).