Chile

The Captaincy General of Chile, a dependency of the Viceroyalty of Peru administered from Santiago, reckoned almost everything in the Spanish colonial peso of eight reales, with the gold escudo at two pesos and the doubloon as the higher denominations. Until 1749 Chile had no mint of its own and coin arrived from Potosí and Lima, which is why the crown’s grant of a Casa de Moneda and the great building that housed it from the 1780s mattered so much locally. Because the colony was a fiscal backwater, its accounts were kept with unusual care by the Real Hacienda, the cabildo of Santiago and the cathedral chapter, and those series survive in good condition and have been extensively published and digitised by the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. That makes Chile an unusually legible case for tracking what a society on the far edge of an empire was willing to pay for design and ornament: the salaries of cathedral architects, masters of the chapel and organists, the accounts for imported Cuzco-school canvases, and the wages of the Bavarian Jesuit craftsmen at the Calera de Tango workshops are all recoverable to the peso.

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Joaquín Toesca’s Annual Salary as Architect of Santiago Cathedral 1780
On 29 March 1780 the Roman-trained architect Joaquín Toesca, a pupil of Francesco Sabatini brought out from Madrid to finish the long-stalled cathedral of Santiago, signed his contract as architect of the fabric at 1,096 pesos a year, almost exactly three pesos a day. He had been called in after his predecessor Francisco Antonio de Barros was released on grounds of ill health, and the contract left him responsible for the remaining bay, the ten interior pillars and arches, the roof, and the whole classical frontispiece; he stayed in charge for nearly twenty years, until his death. The same appointment made him the dominant designer in the Captaincy General of Chile, and he went on to build the Casa de Moneda, the Mapocho tajamares and the cabildo. The sum is converted through the gold escudo of 3.383 g at 0.917 fine, two pesos to the escudo; the 1780 date falls before the 1786 reduction of the escudo from 22 to 21 karats, so the older standard applies without ambiguity.
~1,700g
Guarda, Gabriel, O.S.B. El arquitecto de La Moneda: Joaquín Toesca, 1752–1799. Una imagen del imperio español en América. (Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1997); Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Memoria Chilena, “La primera obra: La Catedral de Santiago,” catalogue no. MC0018543 (2026 accessed).