Arequipa: The Forgotten City

We seemed to have overlooked one of our favorite Peruvian cities, Arequipa. This city is surrounded by active snowy volcanoes that errupt one time every hundred years and sandy mountains. Arequipa is Peru's second largest city and there is a lot of pride for this city from Arequipenos. There is a saying that says, "When the moon separated from the earth, it forgot to take Arequipa." Arequipa at one point wanted to separate from Peru and they even created their own flag and passport. Known as "The White City", Arequipa's unique colonial architecture is built with white volcanic rock that glows in the sun. We visited a very famous convent, Monasterio de Santa Catalina, that occupies an entire city block and at one time housed 500 nuns, but today less than 50 live there. We tried to get a guide, but it might have been late in the day or maybe all the guides were tired because nobody seemed to be interested. Luckily for us, there was another group going through that we thought we might be able to join. One of the group members, however, informed us that we were not part of his group and we were not welcome to join:( It ended up working out though, because instead of learning the actualities of the place for an hour, we got to create our own experience of the monastery. For several hours, we meandered through the city within a city that had maze-like rooms all linking together and stone streets spotted with fruit trees and plazas. The bold colors of the plazas and other walls, shown in our photos, contrasted with the meditative and expansive space we experienced at the monastery with the blackened kitchens and the simple, cold, and stone bedrooms. We hope our pictures show the monastery how we experienced it.