Arequipa, the white city, our over night bus delivered us bright and early to this beautiful city! Each city in Peru has a Plaza de Armas, each well kept, and almost always with a church and a water fountain of some sort. This city is quite famous for the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, a full block, and what seems like the size of a small city, religious space. It has huge stone walls surrounding and a small portion is still an active convent. We opted not to tour this Monastery as it could easily have taken us the entire day, but we did walk around it's ginormous stone walls entirely! Here is a photo of the entrance...
As we wondered the city, we came across Iglesia de San Francisco and a great artisan market. Many people of the local culture spend their day in this square when not working or selling.
And Dejan even made a new friend... (must have something to do with the hat!)
After wondering much of the central part of the city, we decided to head to a Mirado, or over look to view the entire city. It was about a 4ish km hike, mostly uphill. And Dejan made some more friends along the way!
At the top of this hike was a beautiful church, so peaceful!
As mentioned each Plaza de Armas has a church, this one was huge and perfectly white. In front of it is a tree of poinsettias.
We enjoyed this city, but besides the main square, I had a hard time understanding why they call it the white city. There are many white buildings, but also many other colour buildings. Arequipa was nice, and offered lots of additional tours - mostly to the Canyons, which would have been amazing to see, but we've already booked our next overnighter to Cuzco, and we're very excited to enjoy the huge market that takes place there every Christmas Eve day, so we're off!
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