Santa Catalina Convent: A city in miniature
A few meters from the Main Square of Arequipa you will find the Convent of Santa Catalina, founded in 1579, this place is a religious complex in the Spanish colonial style, very well preserved and with thick and high walls, made of pink and white volcanic stone.
The convent of Santa Catalina is really a large enclosure that occupies an area of more than 20 thousand square meters of a labyrinthine network of streets, squares, gardens, rooms and towers, similar to those of the old neighborhoods of San Lazaro and Los Tambos.
The convent was built for the formation of cloistered nuns of the high society of Arequipa, Peru and the world, very few women of low income could enter the convent and if they did it was on the recommendation of an important and prestigious authority, since to enter the parents of the girls had to pay a large amount of money to the convent.
Although nowadays the Convent of Santa Catalina is not inhabited by as many cloistered nuns as in the past, the convent still continues to receive cloistered nuns, who use only a small part of the premises.
The Convent of Santa Catalina is very beautiful, since through its facilities and articles you can appreciate and learn more about how the cloistered nuns lived at that time, in addition to learning about their cultural, religious and social practices. This place is considered a National Historical Monument of Peru.
The Santa Catalina Convent has a museum with religious art of the time, an art gallery that contains works of the Cuzco School ( which represents a fusion of the Inca Culture style with Spanish European influence) and a cafeteria.
The tour of the convent can last approximately 3 hours, we spent more than 5 hours because we were entertained with everything we found there, we took pictures in the gardens, we toured the lower and upper installations, we read the reviews (which are in Spanish and English) of each painting and object.
