The walled city Arequipa couldn't see

Here's the Santa Catalina fact that changed how I picture Arequipa. For 390 years, right in the middle of the city, there was an entire walled town that almost nobody outside it ever saw. Founded in 1579, the Monasterio de Santa Catalina housed over 300 women behind four metre walls, with its own named streets, its own squares, ovens, cisterns and even its own cemetery, a fully self-contained world of blinding white arches and terracotta courtyards.

It stayed that way, hidden in plain sight in a central location, until the 1970s, when the convent finally opened its gates to the public for the first time. What visitors found wasn't a single building but a miniature colonial townscape, streets named Córdoba and Seville, scented with geraniums and orange trees, that had simply been kept secret from the rest of Arequipa for nearly four centuries.

I painted the monastery in watercolour and ink, those deep blue passageways and terracotta courtyards. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Monasterio de Santa Catalina, Arequipa · Travel Poster