Santa Catalina Monastery, Arequipa

The Monastery of Santa Catalina de Siena in Arequipa is a convent that grew into a small walled city. Founded in 1579 by the wealthy widow María de Guzmán, it covers some 20,000 square metres in the heart of Arequipa, enclosed by four-metre walls. Inside lie lanes, plazas, cloisters, a church, kitchens and dozens of individual cells — a world that, for almost four centuries, outsiders never saw. Only in 1970 was a large part of it opened to the public, while a community of nuns still lives in the northern section.

What makes the place unforgettable is colour. The buildings are made of sillar, the volcanic stone of the Arequipa region — white from Chachani, pinkish from Misti — and many walls are washed in deep terracotta red and intense cobalt blue, with geranium pots, arched doorways and stone stairways set against them. The light at this altitude is hard and clear, so shadows fall sharply across the coloured planes; walking from one cloister into the coloured lanes beyond feels like moving between rooms of a painting. The Cloister of the Orange Trees dates from 1738. The Great Cloister, built between 1715 and 1723, is the largest, its arcades hung with colonial paintings.

The convent's social history is as striking as its architecture. Its nuns lived in individual quarters, many attended by servants; by the mid-eighteenth century more than 300 women, nuns and maids together, lived within the walls. Earthquakes in 1600 and 1604 damaged the early buildings, and the complex was expanded and rebuilt over the following two centuries in a mix of colonial, Mestizo Baroque and Neoclassical forms. Details reward slow looking: the blackened walls and old utensils of the communal kitchen, the laundry of 1770 with its row of halved clay jars fed by a channel of running water, the bell tower of 1748. The best-known resident was Sister Ana de los Ángeles Monteagudo, a nun of the convent later beatified for her life of devotion and the miracles attributed to her.

A gallery of several hundred works of colonial religious art occupies part of the former quarters. Late in the day, as the sun drops and the reds and blues deepen, the convent is at its most beautiful.

Getting there

The monastery stands in the historic centre of Arequipa, within walking distance of the main square. Rodríguez Ballón International Airport (AQP) is about 7 km away.