Peru - Lonely Planet Publications [124]
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SIGHTS
Monasterio de Santa Catalina
Even if you’ve already overdosed on colonial edifices, this convent (22-9798; www.santacatalina.org.pe; Santa Catalina 301; admission S30; 9am-5pm, last entry 4pm, plus 7-9pm Tue & Thu) shouldn’t be missed. Occupying a whole block and guarded by imposing high walls, it is one of the most fascinating religious buildings in Peru. Nor is it just a religious building – this 20,000-sq-meter complex is almost a citadel within the city. It is a disorienting place with twisting passageways, ascetic living quarters, period furnishings and religious art – a photographer’s paradise. For a brief history of the convent, see boxed text, below.
There are two ways of visiting Santa Catalina. One is to wander around on your own, soaking up the meditative atmosphere and getting slightly lost (there’s a finely printed miniature map on the back of your ticket if you’re up for an orienteering challenge). Alternatively, informative guides who speak Spanish, English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese are available for S20. The tours last about an hour, after which you’re welcome to keep exploring by yourself, until the gates close. The monastery is also open two evenings a week so that visitors can traipse through the shadowy grounds by candlelight as nuns would have done centuries ago.
For visitors who undertake a self-tour of Santa Catalina, a helpful way to begin is to focus a visit on the three main cloisters. After passing under the silencio (silence) arch you will enter the Novice Cloister, marked by a courtyard with a rubber tree at its center. After passing under this arch, novice nuns were required to zip their lips in a vow of solemn silence and resolve to a life of work and prayer. Nuns lived as novices for four years, during which time their families were expected to pay a dowry of 100 gold coins per year. At the end of these four years they could choose between taking their vows and entering into religious service, or leaving the convent – the latter would most likely have brought shame upon their family.
Graduated novices passed onto the Orange Cloister, named for the orange trees clustered at its center that represent renewal and eternal life. This cloister allows a peek into the Profundis Room, a mortuary where dead nuns were mourned. Paintings of the deceased line the walls. Artists were allotted 24 hours to complete these posthumous paintings, since painting the nuns while alive was out of the question.
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MONASTERIO MISTERIOSO
The Monasterio de Santa Catalina was founded in 1580 by a rich widow, Doña María de Guzmán, who was very selective in choosing her nuns. They came from the best Spanish families, who naturally had to pay a substantial dowry.
Traditionally, the second son or daughter of upper-class Spanish families would enter religious service. For women, this meant going to a nunnery to live in chaste poverty. However, in this particularly privileged convent each nun had between one and four servants or slaves (usually black), and the nuns would invite musicians, have parties and generally live it up in the style to which they had always been accustomed.
After three centuries of these hedonistic goings-on, Pope Pius IX sent Sister Josefa Cadena, a strict Dominican nun, to straighten things out. She arrived like a hurricane in 1871 and set about sending the rich dowries back to Europe and freeing the myriad servants and slaves, some of whom stayed on as nuns. From this point, the convent was shrouded in mystery until it opened to the public in 1970, when the mayor of Arequipa forced the convent