page_title: Bartolomé de las Casas
section_title: Cultural legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Bartolomé de las Casas / Legacy / Cultural legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Residencial Las Casas in Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico
context_page_description: Bartolomé de las Casas was a 16th-century Spanish landowner, friar, priest, and bishop, famed as an historian and social reformer. He arrived in Hispaniola as a layman then became a Dominican friar and priest. He was appointed as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies. He described the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.
  Arriving as one of the first Spanish settlers in the Americas, Las Casas initially participated in, but eventually felt compelled to oppose, the abuses committed by colonists against the Native Americans. As a result, in 1515 he gave up his Indian slaves and encomienda, and advocated, before King Charles I of Spain, on behalf of rights for the natives. In his early writings, he advocated the use of African slaves instead of Natives in the West Indian colonies but did so without knowing that the Portuguese were carrying out "brutal and unjust wars in the name of spreading the faith".
context_section_description: In 1848, Ciudad de San Cristóbal, then the capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas, was renamed San Cristóbal de Las Casas in honor of its first bishop. His work is a particular inspiration behind the work of the Las Casas Institute at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. He is also often cited as a predecessor of the liberation theology movement. He is commemorated by the Church of England in the Calendar of Saints on July 20, The Episcopal Church (USA) on July 18, and at the Evangelical Lutheran Church on July 17. In the Catholic Church, the Dominicans introduced his cause for canonization in 1976. In 2002 the Church began the process for his beatification.
  He has also come to be seen as an early advocate for a concept of universal human rights. He was among the first to develop a view of unity among humankind, stating that "All people of the world are humans," and that they had a natural right to liberty – a combination of Thomist rights philosophy with Augustinian political theology. In this capacity, an ecumenical human rights institute located in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the Centro Fray Bartolomé de las Casas de Derechos Humanos, was established by Bishop Samuel Ruiz in 1989.
  Residencial Las Casas in Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico is named after Las Casas.
  He is also featured in the Guatemalan quetzal one cent (Q0.01) coins.
  The small town of Lascassas, Tennessee, in the United States has also been named after him.
  He is a central character in the H. R. Hays historical novel The Takers of the City, published in 1946.
caption: Residencial Las Casas in Santurce, San Juan
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