Don Antonio Gomez was a political exile from Venezuela and Assessor to Governor Sir Ralph Woodford of Trinidad. He was one of the top-ranking officials on the island. Around 1820 he acquired La Pastora estate, in the beautiful Santa Cruz valley, which had been already planted in cocoa, giving him an additional source of income.
He built a magnificent country mansion with a wrought-iron staircase and marble pavers in the verandah which was one of the wonders of its day, being very much more intricate than any which had been seen in the colony hitherto.
Gomez, a master strategist, orchestrated a marriage deal between his beautiful daughter Soledad and Governor Woodford, with the marriage scheduled for 1828, when the groom would be 43 and the bride, 16 years old. It was also widely rumoured that Woodford was a homosexual. The marriage, though, was never to be, since Woodford died at sea in the same year.
Soledad was courted by and married James Joseph Arnold Roget de Bellouget, the debonair son of a French settler, in 1829. Her dowry amounted to the equivalent of over £2,000. Gomez was not able to pay it all in cash, however, since his finances were in decline owing to poor investments. Soledad continued to live at La Pastora, while her stepmother Amelia, and father resided in their town house, which was situated on the site of today's St Mary's College.
Gomez died abroad in 1843 and soon thereafter, Soledad lost her infant son to illness. Moreover, the executor of Gomez's will, her brother Phillip, went bankrupt and her dowry money vanished. La Pastora was sold to Hypolite Borde, a wealthy businessman who allowed the Roget de Bellouget family to stay on as managers.
When her husband died in 1862, Soledad was forced to sever her final connection with her beloved home, where she had lived for over 40 years, and move in with her children in Port-of-Spain. The grandsons of Queen Victoria, Albert and George (later King George V) arrived in Trinidad in 1880 aboard the HMS Bacchante as midshipmen.
The loyal subjects of the crown went wild with joy. The princes toured various parts of the island including the estates of prominent people. Among them was Hypolite Borde's La Pastora.
After he died in 1904, Borde's heirs sold La Pastora to Joaquim Ribiero, a Portuguese businessman, who lived there in the old house till his passing in 1910. His family ran the estate until it was sold to the government in 1940. The ornate dwelling was pulled down and the cast-iron staircase, installed by Don Antonio Gomez more than a century before, was broken up for scrap.
Today the property falls under the Ministry of Agriculture and is a cocoa propagating station. A small heap of brick and stone masonry is all that remains of the house in the shadow of a massive samaan tree which once saw the cream of society at its door.
