Skulls & Gold: Christianity's Finest

Last Saturday, Jeff and I gave in and did the tourist trip to Lima Centro, the original downtown laid out by Francisco Pizarro and home to the city's main historical centers. We got a ride to the Plaza San Martin, named after the liberator of Peru, and started walking north towards the Plaza de Armas.

A little history from a history major: the Spaniards who arrived in Peru in the 1530s were some of the most hardened fighters in Europe, veterans honed in combat against the Moors across the Iberian peninsula. They were not, by any stretch of the imagination, professional architects. So when Pizarro moved his colonial capital from Cajamarca to the banks of the Rio Rimac in 1535, he drew on his personal background in sketching out his new city, favoring a design based on the fort-town of Santa Fe, a military camp built by the Christians at the siege of Granada in 1491. The strict rectilinear grid, broken only by a main square, was a complete departure from the unplanned, convoluted streets of medieval Europe and, in broadest terms, marked western civilization's first comprehensive city plan since the Romans. With the passage of the Laws of the Indies in 1580s, Pizarro's design became the official town plan in the Spanish Empire, the basis for thousands of pueblos stretching from California to Tierra del Fuego; not bad for an illiterate thug.

Anyway, a lengthy pedestrian street connects the Plaza San Martin to the Plaza de Armas and serves as the main shopping area in the district. You can buy or sell anything you want, though the liberal use of 'the hard sell' can be fairly unnerving. I barely tolerate that tactic in English, let alone in frantic Spanish.

The Plaza de Armas is immense, flanked on one side by the ornate cathedral, on another by the presidential mansion, and the third by Lima's City Hall. It's all very colonial, and quite beautiful and orderly and Baroque. As we walked past the Plaza towards the Church of San Francisco, I saw a bunch of kids doing skateboard tricks off a hand-made grind pipe on the sidewalk in front of the Presidential Mansion. Now that's punk rock.

The Church of San Francisco isn't too exciting from the outside, though the massive flocks of pigeons show the true devotion to the memory of Francis of Assisi. After a few minutes wait, we began our tour of the monastery.

The ornate wooden ceiling of the main staircase, though missing several large chunks from assorted earthquakes, started a fundamental theme in our tour: Christianity is a giant gaudy expression of a faith that either conquers continents or heals the sick. Though trying to follow the example of Jesus or St. Francis, every nook in the monastery is covered in a precious metal pulled out of Potosi by mita-bound slaves. Such is empire.

The end of the tour was a trip through the catacombs, which were quite spacious but not particularly tall, much to Jeff's difficulty. The first series of rooms had nothing in them, though Jeff and I debated how a roof made of bricks could support itself without any sort of vaulting. Apparently 27,000 people were buried under this one monastery, a number I doubted until we reached the Giant Skull Pits of Doom! In adjacent rooms are two cylindrical holes in the floor, each about thirty feet wide, filled with thousands of skeletons. The top layer was a frighteningly beautiful swirl of skulls and femurs doing an eternal Busby Berkeley in the dark.

What was more shocking was the noticeable pieces of litter thrown in with the skulls. I'm not a strong adherent to Christianity, but even I won't risk 27,000 Limenos haunting me for the rest of my life. Como se dice "boo!'?