The foggy capital
Trip Start
Dec 30, 2007
1
42
50
Trip End
Jun 22, 2008
Lima,
Peru
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Lima got the once-over-lightly treatment. The city is huge, and what sights there are are spread out and difficult to visit except by taxi. A haze lies over the city, but it is hard to tell where the smog ends and the permanent cloud cover and mist begins. Considering that this city was founded to give the Spanish secure maritime links to the rest of the empire it does not have very attractive weather for sailing, with a coastline covered in mist the whole time I was here and apparently for about 7 months of the year.
We spent one day wandering around the centre, seeing the grandiose colonial buildings and statues. My favourite statue was a tribute to the independence hero San Martin (on horse on a podium) with a larger than life woman in bronze at the foot of the monument with a llama on her head
Ai-ayapec
. The story goes that this was supposed to be a crown of flames (llamas in Spanish) and the poor craftsman's mistake is explicable, and it certainly makes for a more interesting monument.We visited the church of the St Francis order, which is famous for catacombs. The church itself is quite interesting with cedar everything (choir stalls, dining room, carvings of saints and martyrs etc) and some reasonably good (ie naturalistic) religious art. The best piece is the last supper with the devil at Judas' shoulder and the table laden with Andean dishes like cuy (guinea pig) and potatoes. The catacombs are a warren of tunnels filled with the bones of 25,000 people piled in pits 5m deep. Mostly the bones are tidily arranged by type - all femurs here, other long bones there, skulls over here, small bones somewhere else. this was not a peculiarity of the Franciscans but of those wanting to reopen the site (c1947 after it was closed in 1808). They wanted to know how many people were buried so counted bones. (The dead were dropped in a pit, covered with lime and sand, ready for the next burial until the pit was full.) There is a 'well' 10m deep where the bones have been laid in an attractive pattern of concentric circles with skulls at the centre. No issues about respecting the dead here, although some measures are now taken to prevent people stealing the bones.
Lima's cathedral
We went to the national museum on day two, which almost totally closed in preparation of some summit. One room was open with the 'best of' including a silver blanket 1.5 by 2 m (Moche) that we estimated had 3500 silver platelets sewed onto cloth (as a funeral shroud). There was some attractive pottery (the best again being Moche), but on the whole it was a pretty disappointing outing.
Lima also had a street display of beautiful gigantic aerial photographs from all over the world. It was the same project that was in Wellington a couple of years ago, but different photos, and many of them from places I have now been, but so much more beautiful than any of my photos, so particularly interesting on that count.
