El Carnero de Medellín: The City’s First Chronicle

In 1797 a lame, illegitimate clerk in a small mountain town began writing down everything he could find about the place he lived in. He kept at it for more than forty years. The result — Carnero y miscelánea de varias noticias, antiguas y modernas, de esta Villa de Medellín — is the town’s first home-grown chronicle. The ITM, which sells the modern edition, calls its author “the first chronicler of Medellín” and the work “the earliest historical production of the Antioqueños” (ITM) — a publisher’s description of a book it is selling. El Colombiano, reporting the historian who transcribed it, is blunter: an escribano perhaps with the impulses of a historian and a chronicler, who in the end was neither (El Colombiano).

The manuscript is now free to anyone with a browser. The Archivo Histórico de Medellín published 385 page images of it online under an open licence (Internet Archive).

And almost nobody can read it. The scans are images of a shaky, abbreviation-filled hand from the early 1800s, and the automatic text layer that came with them does not reproduce it. The OCR engine’s own script detector read the handwriting as Japanese, at 0.5567 confidence, even while its language detector called the item Spanish at full confidence (Internet Archive metadata). In three and a half years online it has been viewed fewer than 800 times: its page shows 727, while archive.org’s own views API returns 779 (checked 17 September 2026), rising by about thirty a month.

The manuscript, at a glance

Who was “El Cojo” Benítez?

Almost everything known about his life comes from one person. Roberto Luis Jaramillo, the historian who transcribed the manuscript in the 1980s, is the source for the foundling story, the schooling, the trade and the reading of the title — given in two newspaper interviews, in 2020 and 2021. No document behind those statements has been published, and we found no other scholar who has written on his life. Read what follows as one specialist’s account, not as a settled record.

A man with no biography. As El Colombiano puts it, “little is known of its author because there are no biographies” — his birth year of 1768 is deduced from a watercolour portrait made of him in 1835, which gives his age as 67 (El Colombiano). That portrait is bound into the manuscript. Its caption reads:

Jᵉ ANTº BENITEZ, EN LA EDAD DE 67 Aˢ CUMPLIDOS EL 31 DE DBRᵉ DE 1835

(José Antonio Benítez, at the age of 67 completed on 31 December 1835 — our reading of image 2 of the scanned manuscript.)

Underneath, in a smaller hand: Año de 1836. Por Manˡ Hernandez — our reading of image 2, where a final mark after the name is illegible.

What the historian Roberto Luis Jaramillo established about his life, reported by El Tiempo, is stark. Benítez was “a repudiated child, a foundling. His mother hid him, his father did not answer for him, and he ended up raised by a couple of white Spaniards in Medellín.” He was “lame, deformed, but at the same time had the privilege of study, and did so at school with Francisco Antonio Zea” (El Tiempo).

Being literate in a mostly illiterate town gave him his trade. He drafted contracts, wills, mortgages and letters for other people, which were then taken to a notary to be formalised — “a job below the occupation of escribano”, El Tiempo reports. Some accounts loosely call him an escribano (notary) outright (El Colombiano); the more detailed account makes him an amanuense, a professional copyist.

That job is what made the book possible. It gave him access to the town council’s archive, where he dug out documents including the royal decree authorising the creation of Medellín (El Tiempo). Jaramillo’s verdict on him: “A historian is not one who knows, but one who searches. And he searched, selected, transcribed and interpreted.”

What is inside El Carnero?

Everything, in no particular order. Jaramillo’s summary: it “tells how Medellín became a settlement and how it became a villa; then how it became a city; plus lists of all the councillors and mayors, the creation of convents, the state of the churches” (Alcaldía de Medellín). Its 165 leaves — not counting several drawings and engravings — mix “in vertiginous disorder news, historical documents, reflections, poems, letters and writings of every kind” (El Tiempo).

Four things we read directly off the scanned pages. Image numbers are the ones the archive.org viewer uses, so you can check each one:

• The town’s coat of arms (image 41), under the heading Blazones: “Vn Castillo en Campo [word struck out] de Cielo, con dos Torreones; Encima de la Puerta Vn Corazon con Quarteles Amarillos, y Azules” — a castle on a sky-coloured field with two towers, and above the gate a heart with yellow and blue cartouches. (The printed 1988 edition reads Carteles, cartouches, where we read Quarteles.) Between the towers stands Our Lady of Candelaria, “con su precioso Niño en los Brazos, y Vna Antorcha en la Mano”. Worth saying: this is what Benítez wrote, not necessarily what the arms were. Wikipedia’s heraldry article on the city calls his version “the most erroneous of all”, arguing that the real arms carry a single tower where he put a castle, and a checky field of 15 pieces where he put a heart (Wikipedia).
• Why the town is called Medellín (image 41): the name honours Don Pedro Portocarrero, Count of Medellín, then president of the Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies.
• The first parish priests (image 41): “Primer Cura de este Lugar siendo Citio de Anà, èl Mtrō Juan Gomez de Vreña” — the first priest while the place was still the citio (site) of Aná — and then, from the founding of the villa, a priest whose surname we cannot read with confidence, ending “Bernaldo de Quirós”.
• The author correcting himself (image 5). A whole page on Marshal Robledo and Sebastián de Belalcázar is struck through with diagonal pen strokes, and a note runs down the margin explaining why: “Por estar herrada esta noticia se a testado, y se a Ubicado y corregido en la foxa del frente” — this item being mistaken, it has been struck out and corrected on the facing leaf. Below the cancelled block he sets out his method: the account of the conquest “will continue on the facing page, and with greater attention and clarity”, because “the military operations were various” and the events tangled.

Scholars who have used the printed edition quote passages the scans do not easily give up — though always at one remove, because they quote Jaramillo’s modernised transcription rather than the manuscript. A reader quoting “Benítez” from them is quoting Jaramillo’s reading of Benítez. A 2004 article in Revista Universidad EAFIT cites him on a vestment for Our Lady of Candelaria, “made in the famous textile factories of Paris … of white damask ground, with very fine designs, appliqués, bands and fringes of fine gold thread”, and on the Franciscan Rafael de la Serna opening Medellín’s halls of Latin and Minor Letters (Escobar Villegas, 2004). Benítez also copied into his book several writings of the cleric José María Botero, a contemporary put on trial in the main square in 1836 (Escobar Villegas, 2004).

And he recorded the ugly things. El Tiempo notes his entry on the visitador Mon y Velarde, who in 1785 ordered the building of “a narrow torture box with iron spikes” (El Tiempo).

Why can’t you read it?

Because being online is not the same as being readable. Three obstacles stack up:

1. The OCR could not read the handwriting. It ran with the Spanish model, and its output for the first page begins 0H 102, 1 dr VESIRAORII VIII A IN IL LLS NOLCIAS, — that is the machine’s best attempt (OCR text; item metadata). There is one real exception, and it is worth knowing: Benítez bound printed pamphlets and newspapers into his book, and those pages the OCR read cleanly, including a line from an 1836 Medellín paper (“Medellin Domingo 19 de Junio de 1836”). So the text you can search is the printed inserts, not a word of Benítez’s own hand.
2. The hand is hard. At least 17 people consulted the manuscript before it reached the archive, “many of them plagiarising it or wrongly transcribing his trembling handwriting” (El Tiempo).
3. The one modern transcription is paper-only. Jaramillo spent more than three years transcribing it into modern Spanish, with a long prologue and 345 annotations (El Tiempo). It was printed in 1988 as volume 40 of the Colección Autores Antioqueños and reprinted in 2006 by the ITM. We found no full text of either edition online.

So the situation is: a document the city called “documentary heritage unique in the country” when announcing the donation it had just received (Alcaldía de Medellín), scanned and published free by its own archive, sitting at fewer than 800 views, with no searchable text of its own and no transcription online. English coverage is close to nil, though not quite zero: Wikipedia’s article on Medellín’s coat of arms quotes Benítez’s blazon in translation and calls his description “the most erroneous of all”. Beyond that we found no English-language study of the manuscript in the indexes that answered us. WorldCat, HathiTrust and JSTOR blocked our requests, so that is a gap in our search, not a proven absence.

Is this the famous “El Carnero”?

No. The celebrated El Carnero is Juan Rodríguez Freyle’s chronicle of Bogotá, written between 1636 and 1638, whose real title is Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada… (Archivo de Bogotá). Benítez’s book is a different work, written in a different city a century and a half later.

The borrowing was deliberate. El Tiempo reports Jaramillo as saying the word was chosen because the book is a mixture of many things, and in allusion to Rodríguez Freyle’s El Carnero, which he takes to have inspired Benítez (El Tiempo).

Two archives explain the word two different ways — though they are answering different questions:

• What the word meant. Jaramillo: “a carnero was formerly the place where meat of all kinds was thrown. So the Carnero de Medellín has a bit of everything” (Alcaldía de Medellín). El Tiempo gives his fuller version: “a carnero was the place where they threw meat from different parts: an ear, a finger, a foot … it all went into a common rotting-pit.” A book of scraps, in other words — not a mass grave.
• Why Freyle’s book got the nickname. The Archivo de Bogotá says readers in Bogotá “covered their copies in sheepskin so they would last better” (Archivo de Bogotá).

We could not check a dictionary: Spain’s Real Academia blocks automated access, so we are not asserting the formal sense of the word.

One thing the two books share: Freyle’s also circulated only in manuscript for two centuries, and was not printed until 1859, when Felipe Pérez unified the surviving versions (Archivo de Bogotá).

What does it say about how Medellín began?

The chronicle covers the town’s rise through three ranks, and those milestones are confirmed by official departmental sources:

• 1615 — the visitador Francisco Herrera Campuzano orders the erection of San Lorenzo de Aburrá, at the site of today’s El Poblado (Anuario Estadístico de Antioquia). The department’s own corregimientos page dates that founding to 2 March 1616 (Gobernación de Antioquia).
• 2 November 1675 — governor Miguel de Aguinaga solemnly erects the Villa de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria de Medellín (Anuario Estadístico de Antioquia; Universidad de Antioquia).
• 21 August 1813 — Juan del Corral raises Medellín to the rank of city, a privilege until then held in the province only by Santa Fe de Antioquia and Rionegro (Gobernación de Antioquia). Ten days earlier he had proclaimed Antioquia’s absolute independence.
• 1826 — Medellín is named capital of Antioquia (Gobernación de Antioquia).

Santa Elena, above the city, holds the other half of Medellín’s documented past — see our guide to the Piedras Blancas archaeological area.

Worth noting, because it explains the chronicle’s shape: Medellín had no founding conquistador. As the Universidad de Antioquia puts it, “unlike other colonial cities it was not founded by a conquistador, but arose as a way-station that was settled little by little along the Aburrá valley” (UdeA). A town without a founding myth is a town whose history has to be assembled from paperwork — which is exactly what Benítez did.

Where does the manuscript live now?

In the Archivo Histórico de Medellín, at Calle 50 no. 43-64. It arrived on 22 September 2020, handed over by Juan Fernando Mesa Villa, from a family that had kept it for more than a century (Alcaldía de Medellín; El Colombiano).

Its journey there — as the city tells it, on information that came with the donation — runs through three private transfers: from Benítez to his children Francisco de Paula and María Dolores; then to the historian Estanislao Gómez Barrientos; who gave it to his friend and colleague José María Mesa Jaramillo, whose descendants donated it. The archive’s own online description credits “la familia Londoño Mesa” (Internet Archive).

A photo caption in El Colombiano notes that it is now handled with gloves and kept under controlled temperature (El Colombiano). The archive’s restorer found it well preserved for its age, but noted glue and grease stains, pages eaten by termites, pencil annotations, and a binding that hides parts of the text (El Tiempo).

The Carnero joined a much older collection: the colonial council papers, catalogued under reference code CO AHM FC2, Fondo Concejo de Medellín, produced by the colonial cabildo, 1675–1819. The section goes by two names even within the archive’s own guide — Sección Cabildo Colonial in its headings, Sección Colonia in its captions (Archivo Histórico de Medellín, Guía General). Those papers stayed with the city council until 1997; the archive itself was created by municipal decree in 1993 and operative from 1994 (Guía General). They include council minutes, royal decrees, censuses, wills, limpieza de sangre files and records of the sale and purchase of enslaved people. A rebinding in the 1940s mixed the subjects together and misread dates, in some cases by whole centuries (Guía General).

That colonial collection is inscribed on UNESCO’s regional Memory of the World register for Latin America and the Caribbean (MOWLAC) — not the international register, and not World Heritage. The register lists it as “El cabildo colonial de la Villa de Medellín: Sección Colonia, Fondo Concejo, AHM”, describes a set of 92 volumes running from 1638, and gives the year of inscription as 2014; the city consistently dates its certification to 2015 (MOWLAC register; Alcaldía de Medellín). The archive’s own guide describes the section as 93 volumes spanning 1675–1819, and says so twice. A separate Medellín collection, the Biblioteca Pública Piloto’s photographic archive, went onto the same regional register in 2012.

How can you see it yourself?

1. Read the scans free online at archive.org/details/el-carnero — 385 page images, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, published by the Archivo Histórico de Medellín. Start at image 2 for the portrait and image 4 for the title page, which is headed Memorias, dated 1797 and signed by the author.
2. Visit the archive at Calle 50 no. 43-64, between Girardot and El Palo. It opens Monday to Thursday, 7:30–12:00 and 13:30–17:30, and Friday 7:30–12:00 and 13:30–16:30 (Archivo Histórico de Medellín).
3. Find the printed transcription if you read Spanish and want the text rather than the handwriting: the 1988 Autores Antioqueños edition (volume 40) or the ITM’s 2006 reprint, volume 10 of the Biblioteca Básica de Medellín (ITM Fondo Editorial).
4. Browse the rest of the archive’s uploads — 81 items as of September 2026, including a royal decree of 1674, an 1812 census and a 1678 coat of arms. (El Tiempo dates the decree authorising Medellín’s creation to 1675; the archive’s own scan of a founding royal decree is dated 1674.)

What gets repeated and is wrong

“The author was José María Benítez.” He was José Antonio. The error appears in the first summary bullet of the city’s own 2020 press release, which its body text then contradicts (Alcaldía de Medellín). The manuscript settles it: the 1797 title page is signed “Jose Antonio Benitez” in his own hand, and the portrait caption reads “Jᵉ ANTº BENITEZ”. The likely source of the confusion is that the man who later owned the manuscript was called José María Mesa Jaramillo.

“UNESCO World Heritage” / “the Memory of the World Register”. It is the regional MOWLAC register for Latin America and the Caribbean (MOWLAC register). Different list, different status.

“El Carnero is Colombia’s first novel.” That description — which the Archivo de Bogotá reports as something Freyle’s chronicle “has been called on several occasions” (Archivo de Bogotá) — belongs to the Bogotá book, not this one.

How much of this can be checked?

Three different kinds of evidence sit behind this article, and they are not equally strong.

Strongest: the object itself. The portrait caption, the signed 1797 title page, the coat of arms and the struck-out page are our own readings of the scans, with image numbers so you can check them. Nothing stands between those and you.

Weakest: the life. It rests on one living scholar, reported through two newspaper interviews. If Jaramillo is wrong or was misquoted, several sentences above fall together.

In between: evidence that the manuscript circulated. El Tiempo says at least 17 people consulted it before it reached the archive (El Tiempo). We found two of them, independently of Jaramillo, through full-text search in Google Books:

• Lisandro Latorre Mendoza, Historia e historias de Medellín, quotes the Carnero on the naming of the Doña María creek and then disagrees with it — “aun cuando Benítez en su Carnero traiga el siguiente párrafo”, even though Benítez says otherwise. He calls him “el cronista Benítez” at four other points. (Page 15 of the ITM’s 2006 reprint, via Google Books; we have not seen the 1934 original.)
• Ricardo Olano’s Memorias, published by EAFIT in 2004, names the manuscript by nearly its full title and says that in it “he encontrado algunos datos sobre terrenos y calles de Medellín” — I have found some details about the land and streets of Medellín (Google Books).

Both are search snippets, not pages we read, so treat them as leads a reader with library access could confirm in an afternoon. A historian arguing with the book in 1934 is better corroboration than one agreeing with it: it shows the manuscript open on someone’s desk.

And one absence. Manuel Uribe Ángel’s Geografía general… del Estado de Antioquia (1885) is the great 19th-century description of the region. We searched the Internet Archive’s OCR of two scans of it: neither contains “Carnero” as a title, nor “Cojo”. That does not prove he never saw the manuscript — consulting a book and citing it are different acts — but it is a notable silence.

A note on this guide

Every fact here comes from a source we read in the original Spanish; the translations are ours. Passages quoted from the manuscript itself were transcribed by eye from the scanned pages, with the original spelling kept — Blazones, Quarteles, Citio, Vreña, herrada — and each carries the image number it came from, so you can check our reading against the page. Where a word defeated us, we say so instead of guessing.

Where sources disagree, we give both readings: 92 volumes or 93, running from 1638 or from 1675, inscribed in 2014 or 2015, escribano or amanuense. The date it was finished is another: the archive and the city say the text runs to 1841, while El Tiempo says it was finished in 1840 — and its own “148 years later” arithmetic for the 1988 edition depends on 1840. We have not seen Jaramillo’s printed transcription, so everything attributed to him here comes from interviews he gave to El Tiempo and El Colombiano, or from scholars quoting his edition. One El Colombiano article is paywalled after a few paragraphs, so we used only the part we could read.

We do not reproduce the manuscript images. They are the archive’s, under a licence that does not fit a commercial site — so we link to the archive’s own viewer, which is where you should read them anyway.

References:

• Carnero y miscelánea de varias noticias, antiguas y modernas, de esta Villa de Medellín (manuscript, 1797–1841), José Antonio Benítez. Digitised by the Archivo Histórico de Medellín, 385 images, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Internet Archive · item metadata

• “Un manuscrito sobre Medellín hace 200 años fue donado al Archivo Histórico.” Alcaldía de Medellín, 22 September 2020. Alcaldía de Medellín

• “El centenario manuscrito que revive la historia de Medellín.” El Tiempo, October 2020. El Tiempo

• “El libro Carnero es otro tesoro de la historia de Medellín.” El Colombiano, May 2021. El Colombiano

• “Archivo Histórico de Medellín recibe manuscrito de hace 200 años.” El Colombiano, September 2020. El Colombiano

• Guía General del Archivo Histórico de Medellín (2014), 161 pp. Internet Archive

• Patrimonio Documental de América Latina y el Caribe: Registro Regional MOWLAC 2000–2018, comp. Blanco, Fonseca & Moresco. CNMH–MOWLAC, 2020, 280 pp. Internet Archive

• “El Archivo Histórico de Medellín celebra los 350 años de la ciudad.” Alcaldía de Medellín, 2025. Alcaldía de Medellín

• Escobar Villegas, J. C. (2004). “La historia de Antioquia, entre lo real y lo imaginario. Un acercamiento a la versión de las élites intelectuales del siglo XIX.” Revista Universidad EAFIT 40(134): 51–79. (Quotes Benítez, 1988 edition, pp. 222 and 302.) EAFIT

• Benítez, J. A. (1988). Carnero y miscelánea…, transcription, prologue and notes by Roberto Luis Jaramillo. Colección Autores Antioqueños, vol. 40, 442 pp. (Library catalogues add a roman-numbered prologue, as cii or ciii pages.) Google Books

• Benítez, J. A. (2006). Carnero y miscelánea…, Biblioteca Básica de Medellín, vol. 10. Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano. ITM Fondo Editorial · ITM catálogo

• “El Carnero, la primera novela de Colombia.” Archivo de Bogotá. Archivo de Bogotá

• Anuario Estadístico de Antioquia 2012, generalidades históricas. Gobernación de Antioquia. Gobernación de Antioquia

• “Medellín.” Corregimientos de Antioquia, Gobernación de Antioquia. Gobernación de Antioquia

• “La historia de Medellín se narra con likes.” Alma Máter, Universidad de Antioquia, 30 December 2025. UdeA

• Archivo Histórico de Medellín (address, hours, catalogue). Patrimonio Medellín