Today is the beginning of our 3 week tour trekking around Peru. We have a lovely tour guide Cecilia who is from Peru and a trainee tour guide Samma from Equador.
We started off jumping on a local bus to the the city centre.
Tour group
There are 7 of us on the tour. Rowan and Jani from Oz, me, Samma, Kirsty form England, Collette and Dairmaid from Ireland and Sophie from England. We explored the squares, The Santa Rosa Church and the catecombs in the Monasterio de San Francisco. The monastery holds many treasures of religious art and frescoes which is unique to Peru. The catecombes were a bit claustrophobic and a bit scary. There is a picture of the last supper with a guinea pig being served. There were also a good few tanks in the square.
Did you know?
The catacombs are underground tombs filled with bones. Because archaeologists came to inventory the bones, the bones are now sorted by body type - a bin of pelvises, for example. In one area, the archaeologists created art with the bones, as was done in the French catacombs, a swirl of skulls and femurs. But this was not here originally. The catacombs were used for many years, in lieu of a cemetery. Bodies were brought here, covered in quicklime, and soon reduced to skeletons. It was a quick and sanitary way to dispose of the bodies. Over 25,000 people were buried in the tombs.
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