Santa Catalina Monastery (Arequipa, Peru)

The convent of Santa Catalina doesn't look much from the outside. Its long outer wall blanks off one side of an otherwise busy street near Arequipa's central square. Arequipa is known as the "white city" because much of it is built of sillar, the local white volcanic stone, but time has stained the convent's porous sillar exterior a dingy grey. The effect is not so much forbidding as simply unappealing, unwelcoming. Still, as Arequipa's main tourist attraction, the convent was one of the reasons for our having diverted to the city on our way up to the Inca remains in the Andes, so we waited for a lull in the predatory onrush of taxis, crossed the ...