SOBREVIELA, MANUEL

Missionary, explorer, author, and the mapper of the Amazon Basin; b. Epila, Aragon, Spain, date unknown;d. San Francisco de Lima, 1803. He arrived in Peru in 1785 and for eight years was an active and prudent superior at the Colegio de Propaganda Fide of Ocopa, building up its library with several thousand volumes. With the help of excellent collaborators, he concentrated his work on the missions in the Peruvian Amazon up to the Chanchamayo and Pachitea Rivers, achieving his greatest success in the Apurimac, Huallaga, and Ucayali River regions. He founded and organized towns, built roads, and established schools, granges, and shops, thus promoting the river and land trade between civilized regions and the jungle missions. All this formed a base for more solid and lasting evangelical work. With the same purpose in mind, Sobreviela published numerous reports and accounts of the earlier and contemporary Franciscan work in the Peruvian jungle with descriptions of territories, rivers, tribes, and land and river passages, together with a minute analysis of the causes for the flourishing or decay of the missionary centers in which more than 50 missionaries had already perished at the hands of the natives. As an assiduous correspondent of the Mercurio peruano of Lima, he published in that periodical the synthesis of these studies, some of them translated later into English and French. The most valuable of his various maps, Plan del curso de los ríos Huallaga y Ucayali y de la Pampa del Sacramento (Mercurio peruano, 1791) has had repeated editions, with successive improvements made by Ocopa missionaries and various scientists.

Bibliography: m. de mendiburu, Diccionario históricobiográfico del Peru, 11 v. (Lima 1931–34) 10:224–228. b. izaguirre ispizua, Historia de las misiones franciscanas … , 14 v. (Lima 1922–29).

[o. saiz]