The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

Close to the Plaza de Armas in Arequipa is the Santa Catalina Monastery. Built in 1579, it served as a cloister for Dominican nuns between the 16th and 18th century, and it still houses a small religious community.  Like much else in Arequipa, the buildings are made of volcanic sillar stone, which is porous and prone to cracking, and it was badly damaged in the earthquake in 2001. It was founded by Doña Maria de Guzman, a rich young widow who was the first prioress. All women admitted to the convent were expected to bring a dowry of $150,000USD in current-day money, and a list of 25 items including a statue, a painting, a lamp etc. No wonder it became enormously rich, until the Vatican sent someone out to clean it up (and send all the riches back to Spain).

(Familiar accent narrating the video!)

One of their most famous nuns is Sister Ana de Los Angeles, who entered the convent as a three year old in 1607 for her education. Her parents took her out at the age of ten or eleven in order to marry, but after receiving a vision of Saint Catherine of Siena, she wanted to return to the convent as a nun. (I’m sure that the prospect of being married off as a 10 year old had nothing to do with it). Her mother was furious, and refused to pay the dowry, so her brother paid it instead. She spent the rest of her life there, becoming noted for her ability to predict whether a sick patient would live or die. When she died in 1686 they didn’t need to embalm her because of the sweet perfume her body gave off, and after being exhumed 10 months after burial, she was still fresh. The sisters petitioned to have her proclaimed a saint, but 334 years later they’re still waiting (and she’s probably not quite so fresh).

Creator: Murray Foubister   Source: Wikimedia 

They have a beautiful website here, in both Spanish and English.

http://www.santacatalina.org.pe/index.php/en/

A 15 minute walk from the historic centre is the Casa Museo Mario Vargas Llosa.  In Chile, I was hunting down houses belonging to Pablo Neruda, in Cartagena I enjoyed a Gabriel Garcia Marquez tour, so while in Arequipa, why not check out this museum, located in the birthplace of Peru’s Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargas Llosa. Only 48 people per day are allowed to visit.  I have read only one of his books, The Feast of the Goat, and his most well-known book is probably Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. He ran for the Presidency in 1990 but was defeated by Alberto Fujimori. Hmm…his politics are probably more right-wing than I’m comfortable with, but you can’t argue with his Nobel Prize, awarded 2010 for a huge body of work.  He was a former President of PEN International, and he was recently attacked by China for a column he wrote about coronavirus. Apparently they had a crisis meeting late last year to discuss the poor state of the museum, which has a heavy reliance on holograms but….if I were there, I’d go anyway.  Museums for writers should be encouraged, I reckon.

We knew that Easter Week (Santa Semana) was very important in Peru, so we were keen to see some Easter festivities, little realizing that they would all be cancelled.

On the Friday morning, while still in Lima, we could have seen the Good Friday parade. A statue of “Del Señor de los Milagros” (the Lord of Miracles) is brought out from Lima Cathedral, preceded by women in white veils walking backwards bearing incense. He has been a feature of the Good Friday parades since….1999. That’s invented tradition for you.

We heard that the main cities for Santa Semana celebrations were Cusco, Ayacucho and Arequipa.  At this stage, we were planning to go to Cusco later, and apparently they throw eggs around in Ayacucho, so Arequipa it was.  We were going to fly out of Lima on Good Friday in the afternoon, in time to catch the evening festivities in Arequipa.

Actually, this beautifully filmed video is better than anything we would have seen:

They finish up with a ceremonial burning of Judas. This happens in other cities in Spain and in Mexico too, where they often substitute political figures

He’s a remarkably modern looking Judas, and they do start the fire in a curious place. I’m watching this with a horrified fascination. Boy, that got rid of him.

I’m cheating a bit here, because if we had really gone on our trip, we would have moved on to Arequipa by now on Good Friday.  But given that our planning didn’t get much further than Arequipa, I’ll mentally linger in Lima for a bit longer.

If I’d been there, I would have gone to LUM (Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion- I must say that I don’t know how those words in Spanish fit into the acronym). On my travels I have found myself visiting a museum commemorating atrocities that have occurred in living memory : in Medellin with the Museo Case de la Memoria, The Museum of Human Rights and Memory in  Santiago,  ESMA in Buenos Aires, and the Rwanda Genocide Memorial in Kigali.  I often feel a bit ambivalent about visiting such museums: I’m aware that they spring from a political impetus and are often strongly contested and I fear that I’m being voyeuristic. But I’m also well aware of the importance of truth-telling, something that the Uluru Statement from the Heart implores us to do in relation to Australia’s indigenous history, and something that we seem unable to bring ourselves to do e.g. in the Australian War Memorial. So yes, if I were there, I would visit the museum in this spectacular building.

Santiago Stucci    http://www.flickr.com/photos/santiagostucchi/30799620424

LUM  opened in 2014 to commemorate the dead and to address the country’s enduring polarisation over human rights abuses committed by both the Shining Path guerrillas and  the armed forces in the 1980s and 1990s. It was  funded principally by Germany and also the EU, Sweden and the UN development program. It came under fire almost immediately for being biassed towards Shining Path by the supporters of former president Alberto Fujimori (who is in jail now anyway). However, it was championed by Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa .

Here’s a video about it with English subtitles.

It’s closed at the moment, as is everything else in Peru, because of the coronavirus.  But there’s a good virtual tour you can do, accessed through the link below. Click on the black arrows to go forward, and the blue dots have more information.  It’s all in Spanish, but that’s what Google Translate is for. Or, if you’re learning Spanish as I am, there’s hours of reading here.

https://lum.cultura.pe/visita360

One of the reasons my son was happy to go back to Lima was that he’d be able to visit Centrale Restaurante, famous as No 6 in the list of the 50 best restaurants in the world. The plan was that he and Jesse would go there for lunch, while Nana minded baby Nina. We even made the reservation for 8th April.

Source: Wikimedia.  Centrale Restaurante

Kitchen, Centrale Restaurante

Actually, I must admit that the food looks rather amazing.  Here’s a video, if you like videos of food:

Now, what could I do with Nina while they are gourmeting at the restaurant?  Pop her in the pusher, I think and head off to the  Amano Pre-Columbian Textile Museum in Miraflores, where we were going to stay. It was established by the Japanese businessman Mr. Yoshitaro Amano who began collecting pre-Columbian objects that had been discarded by tomb-raiders. He founded the Amano museum in 1964, one of the first purpose-built museums in Peru. The museum was remodelled after 50 years, after gaining the financial support of the Japanese Embassy, Sumitomo Metal Mining and the Miyasato company.

(Ah, that’s right- there’s a long history of Japanese in Peru.  there was that Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, wasn’t there? Oh dear, that didn’t end well. It seems that he’s still in jail for corruption)

Let’s have a look around the museum.  There’s a virtual museum here, that I found that Google Arts and Culture

https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/permanent-exhibition%C2%A0/twLiPg1FFffbLw

It takes you chronologically through the different Peruvian societies up to and including the Inca, showing their skills in textiles. It’s quite striking when they start using brilliant colours. I assume that these are authentic- it’s amazing that they survived.