I went out for a meagre breakfast off coffee and a cheese roll with Nick and Ian(?) at the Cordano Café. We then had a look at the delightful old Railway Station behind the Presidential Palace, from which trains run to Huancayo.
We crossed the bridge over the fast-flowing brown River Rimac towards a part of the city which looked Arabic with it’s domes. It was pretty run down. Buses churned out black exhaust fumes so in order to avoid choking we walked back around the heavily guarded Presidential Palace to the Post Office and it’s surrounding market.
We had a quick browse of the market stalls and then went to see the Antigo Local de la Inquisitión, but it was closed. In colonial days, Lima was the capital of South America and the seat of Spain’s control over the territories. The museum is located in the building that was used as a headquarters for Inquisition officials from 1570 to 1820. In the Inquistion torture was common. It was here that local people suspected of heresy, blasphemy or witchcraft were detained, interrogated, and sentenced to public burning and execution.
We went to a café for an ice cream and a beer before returning to the hotel to look through some of our guidebooks. At 15:00 hrs. I went out for a snack but found that it was the wrong time of the day to eat. The few cafés that were open were only serving drinks.
I visited the Convento San Francisco de Lima, which was opposite our hotel and after being evicted from an English-speaking private guided tour group, I joined the “peasants” Spanish tour group. We saw the usual array of cloisters, chapels and religious relics, many in silver.
There was a wealth of paintings and sculptures of saints and monks looking pleadingly up to heaven and various arts depicting religious men, including Jesus Christ himself in various states of torture and torment.
We finally descended into the musty catacombs where the bones of 2,500 people are neatly arranged in compartments like a bone wholesalers’ stock of spare parts for skeletons. One circular chamber had concentric circles of skulls between neat “spokes” of arm and leg bones.
Other, less tidy compartments held a dusty heap of miscellaneous bony parts and fragments of skull and pelvises. I couldn’t understand most of the guides spiel, so I didn’t know the story of these long-departed residents.
Now, thanks to Google I learn beneath the church at the Franciscan Monastery in Lima, Peru, there is an ossuary where the skulls and bones of an estimated 70,000 people are decoratively arranged.
Long forgotten, the catacombs were rediscovered in 1943 and are believed to be connected via subterranean passageways to the cathedral and other local churches. Both creepy and beautiful, they feature small grates scattered along the upper floor of the cathedral through which, while you are touring, you may look down at any given moment to see the artistically arranged dead illuminated.
Also, centuries-old catacombs decorated with human bones pepper the crypts at this Franciscan monastery dating to 1774. Decked out in impressive Spanish Baroque architecture, the canary-yellow church and monastery also house a remarkable library with some 25,000 antique texts (some predating the Spanish Conquest) and are flush with romantic courtyards and cloisters. Don't forget to look up: A magnificent Moorish-style cupola, carved of Nicaraguan cedar in 1625, oversees the main staircase.
I returned to my room and spent a while studying the South American Handbook 1988 and composing a letter to Glenn Fenton including cut-outs from the local paper. I composed a To Do List for tomorrow.
At 19:00 hrs. I joined Ian and Nick for dinner. We went to Jerry’s for the usual massive meal. At 21:00 hrs. Ian went back to bed and Nick and I went for a couple of beers in the Macchu Picchu. We talked mainly about the independent music scene in Britain while a lone serenader went from table to table with his guitar.
At 22:30 hrs. we called it a night and before turning in I got some recent magazines from Nick, including Time Out, New Musical Express (NME) and Private Eye. They intended to take the early bus to Pisco tomorrow.
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