Images of a visit to Peru: colonial memories

Inevitably, when you are in Peru – especially urban Peru – then Spain is all about you, intolerant, uncompromising, and still not always loved.  The most obvious impact, after language, is in the architecture, especially of religious and public buildings.  This is most intense in the main towns, and the central squares (always called Plaza de Armas) of Lima, Arequipa and Cusco are elegant, green, safe places, and you could easily be in Spain – though perhaps the people and the surroundings are a little more relaxed, informal, and green.  But in the remote villages, too, there is often a Spanish style church, unpretentious and undecorated, and often therefore with a naive charm the over-decorated cathedrals and monasteries of the large cities lack.  Here are a handful of views:

·  El Cordano restaurant, just off the Plaza in Lima, well worth a visit – an old-fashioned, friendly establishment with excellent food and friendly atmosphere, much patronised by the locals

·  The ornate wooden galleries of the Archbishop’s Palace in Lima, providing a shady place for ladies to watch events below

·  Two views of the Santa Catalina monastery in Arequipa, once a huge establishment with hundreds of nuns, now much smaller, though still as physically impressive.  Originally a dazzling white, it is now painted in these fierce blues and oranges, strangely impressive in the blinding sun

·  A decorated pillar (top of post) in the second cloister of the Jesuit Church in Arequipa – there are three cloisters, one elegant and imposing, one smaller and intensely decorated on every possible surface, and a third, tiny, irregular and domestic

·  An unassuming country church in a village in the Colca valley, not far from Chilpas.

 




 

Comments

[Cornflower]

The colours are interesting, especially the blue against the papaya-orange, and the aqua entrance in the bottom picture.

[philip]

wonderful pictures