A beautiful old church, a fabulously dusty old library, an ornate Arabesque courtyard, art works and treasures of immense wealth. These are a few of the reasons to visit the bright yellow 16th century Franciscan monastery in the center of old colonial Lima, but the thing that pulled me over to the church was the prospect of crouching over like a hunchback and exploring musty old catacombs to see the tombs of hundreds of dead friars and thousands of plague victims!

Got a taste for must and macabre? Check out the Convento de San Francisco in downtown Lima Peru!


Spiritual Might in Lima's Colonial Heart...
Lima sometimes call itself "the Rome of South America". It strikes me as kind of funny, since Quito, the capital of Ecuador, makes the same comparison. Both cities tie themselves to Rome based not on their architecture or artistic heritage, but rather based on their historical significance as a religious center and the large number of colonial era churches found in the city.

Lima does have a veritable armada of awesome churches, but I really think Quito has the stronger claim to the "Rome" title since Quito was really the stronger center of Catholic power in the new world. I think of Lima as more of a mercenary kind of place, maybe a "Zurich of South America" or a "Frankfurt of South America". Besides, awesome as Lima's churches are, Quito can, in my opinion, beat 'em...

Lima was an important religious center though. The Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas dates back to 1540 and it was a vital center of political and social power throughout its history. Most churches would count themselves lucky to have been blessed by a single saint, Lima's Basilica del Rosario holds the ashes and relics of three. And the downtown colonial center of the city hosts at least 4 churches built in the 1500s, and more than I have fingers to count dating from the 17th century. There's even one church that saw its own genuine miracle happen when an earthquake destroyed everything in the place --- except for one mural of Christ that escaped without so much as a scratch...

As cool and as important as all those "other" churches may be, they just don't have what San Francisco has. Namely, they don't have real human bones lying all over the place. How can mere wealth, artistic treasures, miracles, and genuine colonial character possibly compare to a basement full of dismembered skeletons and grisly tales of corpses being thrown into pits beneath the altars above? I mean, seriously, come on....this all adds up to the church of San Francisco being the coolest colonial era site in downtown Lima!


Touring the Monastery and Church...
I usually love classic baroque style churches and cathedrals, but the main church at San Francisco is, to my eyes, rather ugly. I don't care for the Lego building block look of the bell towers any more than I care for the garishly bright yellow paint that covers the building. What a shame the friars didn't ask for my aesthetic advice when they built or painted the place!

The courtyard is fairly small, and the beggars who come have to push aside flocks of equally hungry pigeons for the right to roost on the cracked grey concrete squares outside the church's main entrance. Like most churches, the doors are open to all faithful, but if you want to tour the inner sanctum of the monastery and to go down into the catacombs, you'll have to enter through a side door and pay a fee.

Start your tour in the monastery part of the building --- the part where the Franciscan monks lived, worked, ate, and slept. I use the past tense here, but to be strictly accurate, there is still a small community of Franciscans who live and work here, but today, they number a couple dozen rather than the 150 to 200 men of the cloth who would have toiled here for the glory of God in centuries past. Some parts of the monastery are off limits to casual visitors, and some areas that you can visit --- like the main dining hall --- are used only rarely.

Highpoints of the monastery include the tile work along all the walls on both levels of the corridors surrounding the central courtyard, the altar pieces at each corner, and the painting of the Last Supper that fills an entire wall of the main dining hall.

Most people know Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper. The painting here though is considerably different. It's about a century and a half younger than da Vinci's masterpiece, and it interprets the story just a little bit differently and with a South American eye, as is evident from the dish of roast cuy placed before Jesus and from the presence of children everywhere in the room. Significant too is the depiction of Judas, with a devil standing next to him. In some ways, the painting is more lively than da Vinci's, but its overall mood is, I think, substantially darker and more brooding.

Like most colonial era latin churches, art is everywhere, from paintings of important biblical events, to statues of the saints (naturally including a life-size wood sculpture of Saint Francis of Asisi, the patron of the Franciscan order).

The courtyard might seem to be a simple garden oasis, a place of calm to sit and commune with nature, and it could be just that, but the walkways and corridors surrounding it on all sides are much more than simple passages. They were places of ritual, and they were, and still are, places of beauty and art. The ceilings were hand-carved from Panamanian hardwoods in the 1600s, the walls are done in elaborate Talavera-style patterns in tile imported from Seville, the architecture reflects a Meditteranean mood, with graceful Moorish arches and soft colors and patterns.

From the upper levels of the monastery, you can enter the choiry area of the church. I thought the most impressive thing about the choiry was the enormous rotating iron stand that was used for the giant choir books (a few examples of which are displayed in the library).

Some of the travel guide books that I'd read before going to Peru commented on the magnificent library at this church. It looked to me though like a diamond in the rough, needing a good dusting, some furniture polish, and a few new light bulbs. If you can brush the dust out of your eyes for a moment, the fundamental structure of the place is very cool, with level after level of floor to ceiling book stacks, twin spiral staircases twisting upwards, and a somber, reverential air. Unfortunately, it breaks my heart to see so many shelves of old, obviously deteriorating books. Even though Lima is, climatically speaking, an arid, dry kind of place, centuries of time will still decay mere paper and cloth...

The sacristy is nothing short of spectacular. I never expected to see such opulence or so much wealth and artistic treasure displayed in what is, when you really get down to it, the priests' locker room. The sacristy is where the Franciscans would prepare for their masses and prayer services --- they'd wash up and get dressed here before going into the church to celebrate mass. Banks of hardwood cabinetry hold the vestments and robes, but what really draws your eye is the huge collection of woodblock paintings of saints and Franciscan martyrs. I never knew there were so many martyrs, much less paintings that would celebrate the ways in which they died. One painting shows a beheaded monk, holding his head up with his hands, another shows a priest with a knowing smile on his face as a rope is being lowered around his neck. All those martyrs...it's enough to draw a guy's thoughts down into the cellar to the catacombs...


Crypts and Catacombs and Musty Cellar Stuff...
As a kid growing up in Washington D.C., I used to enjoy going over to the Franciscan Monastery, where you could (and still can) go down into catacombs under the church. I don't really know what it is with Franciscans and catacombs, but they've got catacombs in Lima too. There's a difference though. The catacombs in Washington aren't very old and they aren't real burial grounds --- they're a replica of the infamous catacombs of Saint Calixto in Rome.

In Lima, the catacombs are all too real. They're morbid. They're dark. They're musty and rank smelling. They're cramped and a tad uncomfortably warm to be in. And they're said to contain the bones of anywhere from as few as 25,000 to as many as 70,000 people! (The Franciscans didn't keep records of who they buried or where, they just did what they needed to do...)

25,000 to 70,000. That's a lot of femurs and skulls and spines, and while most of those old bones are buried under layers of dirt and dust, an uncomfortably large number are sitting out in plain sight so close that you could practically touch them (though you won't catch me reaching out to touch anybody's long-dead bones!

In the first few rooms that you enter, there are long coffin-shaped boxed-in areas. These are where the Franciscans buried their own. When someone would die, they would place his body in one of these "boxes" and cover it with lime. They'd then move on to the next box when the next unlucky friar went to meet his maker. Eventually, after a few years, they'd work their way back, stacking a new body on top the oldest now generally disintegrated body.

Things worked a little different in the back rooms --- these are where the Franciscans buried "commoners" (i.e., not priests). I'd heard a couple of different stories about why and how a person came to be buried under the church, none of them particularly pleasant. One story had the "commoners room" initially being used for victims of the Inquisition, the theory being that the souls of devil worshippers would burn from holy water sprinkled on them by the Franciscans and their souls would forever lie in anguish at being so close to the presence of the Lord. Another story was that a plague epidemic hit Lima, and that the Franciscans were the only ones who would touch the rotting corpses left in the streets. Either story is possible, certainly the Inquisition was a big deal in Latin America, and certainly epidemics did happen, though I suppose it's just as possible that it was used as a paupers cemetary, or even just as a community cemetary, much like church cemetaries in a hundred U.S. towns.

Instead of the orderly rows of tombs that you find in the Franciscan area of the catacombs, the commoner areas often had deep wells into which bodies were unceremoniously dumped. Mass graves is essentially what they were.

The Franciscans quit using their basement as a burial ground during the 19th century, and in the 1950s, they opened the catacombs to visitors, installed lights, and excavated some of the tombs, laying out the bones in some semblance of order. Though it's somewhat unsettling today to crawl through the catacombs and find a big tomb containing 200 femurs and another containing 100 skulls, and so forth and so on. In some places, the Franciscans seemed to have had some warped sense of humor, laying out the bones in patterns.

Ah well, if you can't laugh at a little thing like death, what the heck can you laugh at?


Bottom Line...
Even if you're not the type of person who would normally want to visit a church, Lima's San Francisco Church is one that you just might want to make an exception for. It's a beautiful place to visit, filled with eccelesiastic art from the 16th through 18th centuries, it's a place that's got a big historical significance, and best of all, it's got more zombies and dead bodies than a George Romero movie!

UNESCO declared Lima's San Francisco Church a "World Heritage Site". I declare it "Very, Very Cool."


Logistics...
The Convento de San Francisco is located in historic downtown Lima, two blocks from the Plaza Mayor. If you've got a map, it's on Jiron Lampa, one block from the Rio Rimac (near the bridge for Av. Abancay). Visit during daylight hours.


Picture It....
Reviews are one thing, but if you want to check out a few pictures of this fascinating old church, I've put a few snapshots up on my web site for your viewing pleasure...

www.tiogringo.com/conventosf.html



Recommended: Yes

Best Suited For: Friends
Best Time to Travel Here: Dec - Feb