The biggest attraction in Arequipa, Peru’s famous ‘white city’, is the Santa Catalina convent. It’s a whole city unto itself, and not as austere as you might expect. In fact, most of the nuns came from rich families and bought their way in, purchasing nice apartments (or ‘cells’) for themselves. When the church decided to crack down on the luxury living, they cruelly limited each nun to having only one servant each.
The convent’s most famous nun, Sister Ana de los Angeles, continued with the crackdown by insisting that the nuns had to wear their habits without gold ornaments. Some of the other nuns, objecting to an illiterate being put in charge, tried to poison her. And I thought university politics were nasty.
