Santa Catalina Monastery

According to Wikipedia, the monastery was consecrated in 1579 after Viceroy Francisco de Toledo granted the license for its foundation. Dona Maria de Guzman, widow of Diego Hernandez de Mendoza, gave up her assets to join the community under construction, and the foundation record, signed by the town council and others, named her first resident and prioress. The first building was completed on 2 October 1580, when a high mass was held. The article gives 10 September 1579 for the foundation record, while other sources give 15 August 1540 for the founding of the city itself.

The complex covers about 20,000 square metres, and a wall about four metres high isolated the nuns' lives from the city even though the monastery sits in its heart. Inside, streets are narrow and winding, and small cloisters and courtyards are filled with colourful flowers and painted walls. Two types of volcanic tuff are used: white tuff from the Chachani volcano and pink tuff from the Misti, though the infobox calls the stone sillar. The entrance portal carries a relief of Saint Catherine of Siena, the monastery's patron, carved into the tuff wall.

Early members were mostly white criollas and mestizas from wealthy families, along with so-called poor nuns who entered without paying a dowry. By the middle of the eighteenth century the monastery housed more than 300 women in habit, plus servants. Earthquakes in 1600 and 1604 destroyed the first buildings, and the present complex dates mainly from the last third of the seventeenth century. Families built private cells for their daughters, which explains why some sectors are orderly and others irregular. In 1747 four nuns left to found the Santa Rosa monastery elsewhere in Arequipa. The monastery stayed closed behind a veil of silence until 1970, when much of it opened to the public. Nuns still live in the northern part of the complex.

The Cloister of the Orange Trees dates from 1738 and is named for its orange trees, and three crosses in its middle are part of a tradition in which nuns represent the Passion of Christ each Good Friday. The Major Cloister, built between 1715 and 1723, is the largest and surrounds 32 colonial paintings, 23 of them about the life of Mary. The Courtyard of Silence was where nuns prayed the Rosary in silence. The kitchen has a high domed ceiling and walls blackened by fires, and the laundry, built in 1770, has twenty large clay half-jars through which water ran along a central channel.

The church has a long nave and semicircular dome and a plan dating from about 1660. It has an altar of embossed silver and an altar dedicated to Blessed Sister Ana of the Angels Monteagudo, a nun beatified for her conventual life. The bell tower was built in 1748 and has bells facing the surrounding streets. Wikipedia adds that an art gallery holds roughly 400 colonial pieces, including works of the Cusco School.

The monastery appears in the second half of Michele Lovric's novel The Book of Human Skin, and the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor visited in 1971 and wrote about it. The site has uneven floors and is best explored slowly, and a private guided visit with a driver and guide helps a group make sense of the layout.