Photo Essay: The Monastery of Saint Catherine (El Monasterio De Santa Catalina), Arequipa, Peru

The silence was rather perturbing. Our daughter Luna must have felt the same, for she broke it the second we stepped in the deserted monastery. Her bawl traveled through alleys and bounced off multihued walls. The echoes greatly multiplied. A depiction of the property's vastness. Over twenty thousand-square-meter-vast, to be more accurate.

Hence it's called 'a city within a city'.

The Monastery of Saint Catherine (El Monasterio De Santa Catalina) in "White City" Arequipa was established in the 1500s. Its wealthy founder Doña María de Guzmán's social standing attracted women from upper class Spanish families to enter the novitiate here. A hefty dowry is paid for one's admission (the nuns' affluence can be determined by their belongings displayed in sleeping cells-turned-exhibit halls today). 

This fortune helped the monastery burgeon for years.

A stroll along an empty calle or through colonnades or around a courtyard is a journey back more than four hundred years in time. If novices paid a pricey dowry long ago to get in, tourists these days pay a reasonable 35 soles ($12).
 











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