One of the beautiful little streets in the Santa Catalina Monastery
Poor Arequipa. If you want a great urban experience in Peru, you go to Lima. If you want a great Andean experience, you go to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. As Peru’s second largest city, just one-tenth the size of Lima, Arequipa can be overlooked. Tis a pity, though, because it’s a vibrant, beautiful city with world-class hiking in the nearby Colca Canyon. High up in the Andes – the city sits at about 7,600 feet above sea level – Arequipa is also blessed with a wonderfully cool climate, with average summer highs (recall that it’s summer here) in the low 70s. Delightful.
Arequipa’s cathedral right on the central plaza
One of the most striking things about Arequipa is the local white sillar rock out of which much of the center part of the city is built. The result of volcanic eruptions, sillar is light, porous and easily carved, yet sufficiently strong to be the central element in construction. As a result buildings are beautifully white with great domes and vaults. The central core of Arequipa – particularly the baroque cathedral on the central plaza and the nearby Santa Catalina Monastery – was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000.
One of the first sights you see on entering the monastery
Many of the buildings in the monastery have these great vaulted ceilings. This is part of the art collection on display.
One of the first things you notice as you tour the nun’s cells is that these were not poor women. Their quarters were surprisingly spacious, often with private kitchens and parlors separate from the bedroom. In fact, families had to pay a dowery of the equivalent of about $150,000 in today’s dollar. Women, we learned, owned their quarters and could and did sell them to other nuns. One of the women who entered, we read on the description of her cell, entered with a variety of possessions including one slave. Not the picture of nuns that I usually have.
And then there’s the food. We remembered from our trip to Peru in 2010 that the food here was great but I really didn’t remember it being this great. One lunch we had at a little place called Qaya was one of the great lunches I’ve ever had and sometimes it seemed as though there were no bad choices when it came to the restaurants.
We came here for four days, but spent nearly all of two of those days on a hiking trip up in the Andes a couple hours north. The time we spent in Arequipa, though, was pretty great. It’s funny; you just have no idea before getting to a new city like this if you’ll love it or be quickly bored. For every San Cristóbal (which we fell in love with) there’s a Paracas that’s, well, not so exciting. Arequipas was one of the great finds.
Mark inside the monastery
This beautiful park is part of the monastery but unfortunately was fenced off from tourists
Mark loved the color contrast of this doorway. Amusingly, it’s the entrance to the toilets.
Another street view
There were beautiful flowers, plants, and bushes all over
And ornate doors
Little nooks and crannies everywhere
Of course, the monastery was a place for worship. Latin Americans love to emphasize Christ’s suffering, as this bleeding Jesus attests to. And yes, that’s Mark’s reflection hovering over Him.
And then there was the food. This is octopus covered in a garlic and olive sauce. In a word, extraordinary.
One of the sillar-constructed buildings running along a side of the central plaza, with part of the cathedral in the background
And finally the view from our hotel’s roof deck across the plaza to the cathedral.