Monestaries and Mummies in Arequipa

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After a good nights sleep and an excellent breakfast we decided to walk around the city of Arequipa, fully avoiding bus transportation. Arequipa is known as the White City and is very beautiful with white colonial buildings, a beautiful main square and much cleaner and more upscale than most cities. The city is surrounded by active volcanoes and the majority of buildings are constructed using volcanic sillar, the white ash from a volcanic eruption.

We looked in the artisan shops, walked around the main square and did a number of tourist sites including the monestary of Santa Catalina, a city within a city. We also visited the Museo Santuary which houses the mummy Juanita, the Ampato Maiden. The Museo Santuary presented an excellent film which described the child sacrifices made by the Inca people to the volcanic mountains, which they considered to be gods. The mummy of Juanita, a twelve year old girl was found by accident in 1995 on the Volcano Ampato. A team of researchers studying a nearby volcano had stumbled upon some burried artifacts on the Ampato mountain, which led them to believe it was a burial ground. They brought the artifacts down from the mountain for study and made a return voyage to search for the mummified body. At this time they found Juanita, who had fallen a great distance from her frozen burial ground due to melting ice resulting from the neighboring erupting volcano. With this discovery they continued to search the mountains and volcanoes surrounding Arequipa and found several more bodies on Mount Ampato and 14 children in total in Peru. They have also found sacrified children on mountains in Chile and Argentina. The museum had excellent displays of the items found burried with each of the children and the encased mummy of Junita. We both found this museum and display very interesting but also haunting.

We finished our visit to Arequipa with a nice dinner in a charming Arequipena restaurant. We then returned to the hotel as we had a early morning coming up, inwhich we were heading for the Colca Canyon.

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