The Last Days of the Incas’ Peru Tour #9 (Cusco)

Cusco (3-4 Days) 

Visiting La Merced Monastery and Church

(Burial site of Diego de Almagro Sr, Diego de Almagro Jr, and Gonzalo Pizarro. Repository of the painting (above) that adorns the cover of The Last Days of the Incas)

Just a block to the southwest of the Plaza de Armas (which makes three major churches in a three-block radius!) lies La Merced Monastery and Church, begun in 1534 and rebuilt in the late 17th century. The monastery (to the left of the church) is one of the little-known jewels of Cusco and is beautifully designed around a central garden and courtyard. The arcades around the garden are surprisingly hung with a large number of “Cusco-school”-style paintings of very high quality. The first painting on the left, in fact, as you enter the monastery, is the same painting that adorns the (U.S. and Canadian version) cover of The Last Days of the Incas. It actually depicts armored Spaniards on horseback fighting the fierce Araucanian Indians in central Chile, who resisted Spanish attempts to conquer them for centuries. On one of the horses rides a white-robed Mercedarian friar carrying a lance–one end of which bears a metal crucifix. Above him, the Spanish patron Saint Santiago, whom the Spaniards often invoked during their pitched battles against various natives in South America, is performing a miracle—turning the Araucanians’ arrows back upon themselves. On the far side of the cloister you’ll find a small art museum. Within it (and outside on the cloister’s walls) is the best collection of Cusco-school paintings in the world…

Within the adjoining La Merced Church you’ll find a reclining statue of a bloody, crucified Christ within a glass case and also a statue of the Virgin Mary above. Both are paraded through the streets of Cuzco during la Semana Santa, or Easter week. Nearby, in the central part of the church on one of its pillars is a plaque that states that beneath the floor is buried Diego de Almagro,within a crypt. Also buried here is Almagro’s son, who helped in the assassination of Francisco Pizarro in 1541 and who was himself executed on the nearby Plaza de Armas a few years later, not far from where his father was executed. Here also lie the remains of Gonzalo Pizarro, who rebelled against the Spanish crown and was executed by royalist forces in 1548, not far from Cusco.

(To be continued…)

(Below: the interior cloister of La Merced Monastery with Cusco-school-style paintings hanging on the walls inside the portals)