Santa Catalina Monastery

Interior of Santa Catalina Monastery Santa Catalina Monastery was founded on the second of October in 1580 and has an extension of 20000 square metres and was constructed in the second half of the XVIth Century. The Convent, in which there are still nuns living in cloisters, is a walled small city with narrow streets, passages, stair cases and small squares.

The Convent, a city in miniature closed to the public until 1970, combines the white colour of the sillar with other tonalities, like ochre, indigo and orange that go well with the otherwise austere style.

The founder of the monastery was a rich widow, Maria de Guzman. The tradition of the time indicated that the second son or daughter of a family would enter religious service, and the convent accepted only women from high-class Spanish families. Each nun at Santa Catalina had between one and four servants or slaves, and the nuns invited musicians to perform in the convent, gave parties and generally lived a lavish lifestyle. Each family paid a dowry at their daughter's entrance to the convent, and the dowry owed to gain the highest status, indicated by wearing a black veil, was 2,400 silver coins, equivalent to US$50,000 today. The nuns were also required to bring 25 listed items, including a statue, a painting, a lamp and clothes. The wealthiest nuns may have brought fine English china and silk curtains and rugs. Although it was possible for poorer nuns to enter the convent without paying a dowry, it can be seen from the cells that most of the nuns were very wealthy.

 
One of the many alleys at the Santa Catalina Monastery.In 1871 Sister Josefa Cadena, a strict Dominican nun, was sent by Pope Pius IX to reform the monastery. She sent the rich dowries back to Europe, and freed all the servants and slaves, giving them the choice of remaining as nuns or leaving. In addition to the stories of outrageous wealth, there are tales of nuns becoming pregnant, and amazingly of the skeleton of a baby being discovered encased in a wall. This, in fact, did not happen in Santa Catalina, and there are rumours of the same story in the nearby Santa Rosa convent, as well.

The convent once housed approximately 450 people (about a third of them nuns and the rest servants) in a cloistered community. It was opened to the public in 1970, when the nuns opened their doors to tourism to pay for the installation of electricity and running water, as required by law.

Misti Volcano

El Misti, also known as Guagua-Putina, is a stratovolcano located in southern Peru near the city of Arequipa. With its seasonally snow-capped, symmetrical cone, El Misti stands at 5,822 m above sea level and lies between the mountain Chachani (6,075 m) and the volcano Pichu-Pichu (5,669 m). Its last eruption was in 1784.

El Misti has three concentric craters. In the inner crater fumarole activity can be seen. Near the inner crater six Inca mummies and rare Inca artifacts were found in 1998 during a month-long excavation directed by the archaeologists Johan Reinhard and Jose Antonio Chavez. These findings are currently stored at the Museo de Santuarios Andinos in Arequipa.

There are two main climbing routes on the volcano. The Pastores route, which is more used, as its starting point is nearer to the city of Arequipa, starts in 3,300 m. Usually a camp is made in 4,500 m at Nido de Aguilas. The second route, the Aguada Blanca route, starts at 4,000 m near the Aguada Blanca reservoir and a camp is made in 4,800 m at Monte Blanco (the name of the camp comes from the fact that it has more or less the height as the summit of Mont Blanc). Neither climbing routes presents technical difficulties but both are considered strenuous because of the steep loose sand slopes.

Colca Canyon

Colca Canyon is a canyon of the Colca River in southern Peru. It is located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Arequipa. It is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the United States. However, the canyon's walls are not as vertical as those of the Grand Canyon. The Cotahuasi Canyon to the northwest is a deeper canyon at 11,488 ft (3,501 m). Since they are such major features of the landscape, the Colca and Cotahuasi canyons are both easily recognizable in even low-resolution satellite photos of the region. The Colca Valley is a colorful Andean valley with towns founded in Spanish Colonial times and formerly inhabited by the Collaguas and the Cabanas. The local people still maintain ancestral traditions and continue to cultivate the pre-Inca stepped terraces.
The canyon is home to the Andean Condor (Vultur gryphus), a species that has seen world-wide effort to preserve it. The condors can be seen at fairly close range as they fly through the canyon walls and are an increasingly popular attraction. 'Cruz del Condor' is a popular tourist stop to view the condors, the pass where condors soar gracefully on the rising thermals occurring as the air warms. The condors are best seen in the early morning and late afternoon when they are hunting. At this point the canyon floor is 3,960 ft (1,200 m) below the rim of the canyon.

The La Calera natural hot springs are located at Chivay, the biggest town in the Colca Canyon.

The Mummy Juanita or  Momia Juanita

Momia Juanita (Spanish for "Mummy Juanita"), better known in English as the "Ice Maiden," is an Inca mummy of a girl, or more precisely, a frozen body, between 12-14 years old, who died sometime between 1440 and 1450.

She was discovered in southern Peru in 1995 by anthropologist Johan Reinhard and his Peruvian climbing partner Miguel Zarate. Also known as the Lady of Ampato and the Frozen Lady, Juanita was taken on tour in the United States in 1996 and in Japan in 1999 before she was returned to Peru.

The mummy was remarkably well-preserved after 500 years, making her one of the more important recent mummy finds; indeed, this discovery was chosen by Time magazine, in 1995, as one of the world's top ten discoveries.

According to Reinhard, when found in Mount Ampato (part of the Andes cordillera), the mummy weighed approximately 80 pounds. Reinhard and his partner then realized that the heavy body mass was due to freezing of the flesh. This preservation allowed biological tests to be run on the lung, liver, and muscle tissue. These offered new insights into Inca health and nutrition during the reign of the Sapa Inca Pachacuti.

The young girl's body was taken to the United States and underwent a virtual autopsy in the laboratories of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. The mummy was subjected totomographies and X-ray examinations. Scientists reached the following conclusions:

- she had died at the age of 14, between approximately 1440 and 1450;
- she had had a stature of 1.40 meters;
- she had weighed 80 pounds at the time of death;
- she was slender in build and body shape;
- she had not suffered of any illness;
- she had had a perfect denture and strong bones;
- she had had a good and well-balanced diet;
- she had fasted one day before the sacrifice;
- she had a 5cm fissure in the skull; and
- she had died from blunt force trauma to the head (scientests think it may have been a club)
It is believed by some archaeologists that the Ice Maiden was in fact a human sacrifice to the Inca mountain god (Apus). The Ice Maiden was then buried by the Inca priests atop Mount Ampato (20,700 feet, or 6,309 m) in Peru, and left undisturbed until discovered by Johann Reinhard in 1995.

These discoveries seem to support the theory that during the Inca empire, human sacrifice rituals were still practiced, contrary to the common theories of some archaeologists and historians who deny it. Indeed the mummy was, in Reinhard's opinion, "a young sacrifice victim killed by Inca priests to appease the gods, especially the gods of the mountain." However, what indeed is indicated is that during this epoch, neither anthropophagy nor necrophagy were practiced; on the contrary, both were punished.

Konrad Spindler has said that Juanita is "the best conserved human being from America", adding that she is "the first woman found in Andes closer to Cuzco  she could have been from Cuzco and had arrived alive to the snowy mountains and then sacrificed in a couple".

The Cathedral of Arequipa

The Basilica Cathedral of Arequipa ("Basílica Catedral", in Spanish) is located in the "Plaza de Armas" of the city of Arequipa, province of Arequipa, Peru. It is the most important church of the city and Diocese of Arequipa since it is the base of the Archbishop and Metropolitan council. The cathedral is also considered one of Peru's most unusual and famous colonial cathedrals since the Spanish conquest.