Arequipa is the second largest city by population (approximately 900,000), and is located in the Andes in the southern part of Peru. It’s up fairly high, at an altitude of about 2300m, although taking the whole trip to Peru into account, that’s about half of the highest altitude that we reached. It has a nickname, “La Ciudad Blanca” (The White City), due to the fact that many of the buildings are constructed of a white volcanic rock.
Getting off the plane, we were greeted with the sight of El Misti. This volcano, the most prominent in Arequipa, used to have a white top of snow but with warmer temperatures it isn’t seen anymore.
We signed up for one of the bus tours a few hours after arriving to get our bearings and visited a lookout that offered a view of El Misti (middle) surrounded by Picchu Picchu (right) and Chachani (left). Click through for the full-size version:
One of the places that we visited was a water-powered mill.
The Santa Catalina monastery is something to definitely see while in Arequipa. About 20 nuns still live there, but the rest of the monastery is open to the public.
The most notable attribute of the monastery is the coloured walls. The blue coloured walls indicate a private area, while the red walls indicate a public area.
A special sort of rock is used to filter the water, and the filtration process can take a while. From memory about a litre of water could be filtered every five hours.
One of the bus tour stops was a mini zoo of sorts that contained llamas, alpacas, vicuñas and guanacaos. I had my first experience of being spat at, and I have the guanacao to thank for that. I honestly thought he just wanted to chat.
Here are some more photos taken while walking around the main square of Arequipa.
I swear there is no better way to finish the day than with a hot emoliente, a traditional Peruvian herbal drink. We spent a bit of time trying to find someone who was making them, but it was completely worth it.
That in a nutshell was our experience of Arequipa. The next two days were spent in the Chivay/Colca Canyon area (chasing condors), which will be the subject of my next Peru post. The full set of photos from Arequipa is up on flickr here.
