On its three and a half hectares of surface, thirteen cloisters have been built (six of them of great magnitude), three temples, a large Atrium, adding approximately 40,000 square meters of construction.

The complex is preceded by the Plaza de San Francisco that for years supplied the city with water from its central fountain, and which has functioned as a popular market, as a space for military and political concentrations, and as a meeting place and social recreation.

The concave-convex staircase that connects the square with the Atrium, which highlights the Mannerist-Baroque facade of the main building, is considered of great architectural importance in the Colonial Americas.

In pre-Columbian Quito, the current lands of the Basilica and Convent of San Francisco were occupied by the royal palace of the Inca Huayna Cápac,[3] before the advance of the armies commanded by the Spanish from the south and the impossibility of defending the city the indigenous general Rumiñahui ordered its total destruction.

With the support of the European Franciscan Congregation, the Ghent's clerics Jodoco Ricke and Pedro Gosseal, who were cousins of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor,[4] they arrived in the city two years after its foundation, managed to acquire some plots on the southwest side of the Plaza Mayor de Quito, in the same place where one day the military seats of the heads of the imperial troops were: Chalcuchímac and Quizquiz.

Despite the fact that San Francisco has preserved its physical structure unalterably, at this stage there were changes linked to the application and use of new construction techniques and materials at the time of the interventions.

On the other hand, with the installation of new dependencies (museum, printing office, theater, radio, private educational establishment) there was a functional readjustment of its spatial structure that, gradually, became more public.

As in these, in San Francisco, in addition to the basic dependencies we have those dedicated to health, education, trades, orchard and even a jail (to maintain the strict conventual discipline).

Many times these changes were "violent and misguided" due to earthquake damage and the evolution of art and culture to finally reach the almost Eclectic form we know it today; That is why San Francisco is one of the most important buildings in Colonial Hispanic American architecture.

The Renaissance severity and exterior Mannerism contrast with the internal decoration of the church, in which Mudéjar and Baroque styles are mixed with gold leaf to give an unusual splendour.

In the choir, the Mudéjar decoration, original from the end of the 16th century, remains intact because the central nave collapsed in an earthquake and was replaced by a Baroque coffered ceiling in 1770.

The most outstanding case in the second half of the 17th century was that of Don Francisco de Villacís who, on 6 November 1659, founded a chaplaincy of ten thousand pesos, census taxes on his assets and especially on the Hacienda Guachalá, located in the Cayambe valley, becoming its patron saint.

The patrons of the chapel lost their rights by not accepting a contract, by which they were offered the old crypt behind the sacristy, where the religious were buried, in exchange for paying ten thousand sucres in cash.

It was handed over by the Franciscans to the Brotherhood of the Veracruz de Naturales, made up of the most skilled indigenous sculptors and painters of the city of Quito, who immediately began its construction in 1581.

However, by 1763 the indigenous had already lost all rights, and by successive decrees the space for the cult of the Our Lady of Sorrows, patron saint of a brotherhood also of painters and sculptures, had been authorized, but this whites and mestizos, which had gained greater prestige over time.

In this characteristically Baroque altarpiece, there is a clear predominance of decorative elements over images; It is complemented by the magnificent Calvary group (of which the Our Lady of Sorrows is a part) placed in its central niche, also attributed to the master.

Being the very cradle of the famous Colonial Quito School of Art, which saw the birth and development within its walls, the San Francisco Complex is, without a doubt, the largest gallery of this artistic movement.

The Jesús del Gran Poder is the main icon of one of the two largest religious processions on Good Friday in Ecuador, which brings together popular strata, in an act of curucuhos and penitents, in the purest medieval style, evoking the Spanish Seville.

The two side naves of the church are filled with sculptures of saints placed on altarpieces covered in gold leaf, before whom hundreds of faithful kneel every day to implore miraculous "intercessions".

Among the most relevant pictorial works of San Francisco, we have: The convent also keeps a series of 16 easel paintings exhibited in the zaguan, corresponding to the 17th century and attributed to Miguel de Santiago.

The series known as The life of Saint Francis of Assisi, for its part, is a collection of 27 large easel canvases attributed to different artists, which are located in the corridors of the main cloister.