The tracista: five hundred years of drawing so that others can cut
Updated on September 20, 2026 · The Tracista team
In 1558 the chapter of Seville decided to put bells on top of a hundred-metre Almohad minaret that had been standing for four centuries. Nobody had done that before. Nobody knew how much weight a brick tower raised by another civilisation could take, or how to seat a Renaissance belfry on a geometry that was not its own.
They called a man from Córdoba, Hernán Ruiz, whose trade had a name almost nobody uses today: tracista. The one who makes the trazas. The one who draws.
Hernán Ruiz laid no bricks. He drew. Plan, elevation, section: every arch, every moulding and every bell opening resolved on paper before it existed. Ten years later, in 1568, a bronze weathervane was turning on top of the Giralda. The tower did not move. The drawing was true.
The floor as paper
Those workshops had a room that no architecture practice has today: the sala de montea, the tracing floor. A vast, smooth plastered surface where the tracista drew the vault he was about to build at full size, with compass and straightedge.
That drawing produced the templates: boards cut to the exact shape of every face of every stone. The mason received the template, not the drawing. He cut a voussoir he would never see fitted to the others. Hundreds of people carving pieces of a puzzle whose complete image existed only in one head and on the floor of that room.
The day the centring came down and the vault stood on its own, nobody looked at the mason. They looked at the tracista.
A countryman of Hernán Ruiz, Alonso de Vandelvira, wrote the method down in a book that still survives: Libro de trazas de cortes de piedras — book of the drawings for cutting stone. Trazas. Cuts. The drawing that lets you cut. The whole trade is in that title.
Making the drawing public
Twenty years later another tracista, Juan de Herrera, finished El Escorial and did something nobody had done in Spain: he printed the drawings. In 1589 he published the trazas of the building, engraved by Pedro Perret, so that anyone could read the work without ever setting foot on the site.
That is the leap that matters to us. The drawing stopped being a workshop secret and became a document. A contract. A truth that could be shared, argued over and checked without standing in front of the stone.
What changes and what does not
Today the idea no longer lives in a single head: it lives in a 3D model. And there the differences end.
The shop floor still needs exactly what Hernán Ruiz's mason needed. A view. A dimension. A section. A drawing you can cut from, with its scale and its title block, saying without ambiguity what has to be made.
What has changed is who draws and how long it takes. The tracing floor is now a few minutes of computation, and the wooden template is a PDF and a DXF. The work itself — turning a solid idea into the flat views that let you cut it — is the same as in 1558.
Hence the name. We draw so that others can cut.
The El Escorial engravings used across this site are by Pedro Perret after the designs of Juan de Herrera, 1589, and are in the public domain: the interior section comes from the Rijksmuseum and the general plan from the historical collection of the University of Seville.