Santo Domingo de Guzmán, Oaxaca

Santo Domingo de Guzmán is the great set piece of Oaxaca, the colonial capital of a southern Mexican state. The church closes the northern end of the town's pedestrian street, its stone facade between two stout bell towers rising above a broad plaza; at sunset the whole front glows. In the centre of the facade Saint Dominic and Saint Hippolytus hold up a model of a church on which the Holy Spirit descends, and the domes behind are dressed in glazed tiles. It is a sober, almost fortress-like exterior, and it gives little away.

The Dominicans, who reached Oaxaca in 1528, were given the land in 1551, but money was short and progress slow; after earthquakes in 1603 and 1604 wrecked another convent in the city, the work was pushed on, and the complex was inaugurated, still unfinished, in 1608. The decoration of the church was completed in 1666, and in 1724 work began on the Rosary Chapel. The interior is where the building turns from sober to dazzling. Step under the choir at the entrance and look straight up: the low vault carries a family tree of Saint Dominic, the founder of the order, in gilded and painted plaster, his ancestors branching across the ceiling like the limbs of a vine. Beyond it the nave opens into a blaze of gilded stucco and golden altarpieces, and off to one side the eighteenth-century Capilla del Rosario is more lavish still, built around the Virgin of the Rosary.

The building has had a rough history. During the War of Independence and the civil wars that followed it was occupied by one army after another; under the Reform laws of 1859 church and convent were handed to the army and used as barracks, a military warehouse and stables, before the church was returned to worship in 1902. The present high altar dates only from 1959, part of a long restoration after the Dominicans came back. The former convent now houses the Cultural Centre of Oaxaca, founded with the help of the painter Francisco Toledo, whose most famous treasure is the Mixtec treasure found by Alfonso Caso in Tomb 7 at Monte Albán; the old monastery garden has become an ethnobotanical garden of the state's native plants. Church and convent lie within the World Heritage historic centre of Oaxaca.

Getting there

The church stands on the Plaza de Santo Domingo, about half a kilometre north of Oaxaca's Zócalo, linked to it by the cobbled pedestrian street of Macedonio Alcalá. Xoxocotlán International Airport (OAX) lies about 7 km away, a short taxi ride from the centre.