Catacomb Visit? Be Sure to Wipe Your Feet

Initially it may seem out of character that we decided to go tour Basílica y Convento de San Francisco de Lima. Sounds a little stodgy for two high-octane throw-caution-to-the-wind explorers like Tammy and I, but read on.

The church and monastery were completed in 1674. Though it survived several earthquakes intact in 1687 (8.7M) and 1746 (8.7M), it suffered extensive damage in an earthquake in 1970 (7.9M). The earthquake info becomes important later in this post.

That’s a basketball team there for size perspective

We walked around outside the before going in but you really didn’t get the perspective of how huge this church is. It goes on and on and on, not to mention down. Tammy and I were both thinking man they spent a lot of money on this place when the people who lived around it slept in clay dwellings.

We joined up with a Spanish speaking tour which added to the ambiance but not much in the way of info. There were posters in English here and there so I think we got the gist of most of it. The woodwork, tile and construction were amazing.

The library looks like a movie set. Full of ornate woodworking, circular staircases and books…old books, some pre-dating the conquest. They wouldn’t let us browse. The art work throughout the church was dark and semi-spooky. What we really wanted do was get to the spooky-spooky part of the tour, the catacombs!

Some movie must have been filmed here, right?

Apparently if you were important enough or rich enough you could have your body buried under the church in the catacombs. Rumor has it that these catacombs are extensive and go all over the place. Everywhere we walked underground there were nooks, crannies and other passageways that led off to more bones. It’s not well lit, floors, walls and ceiling are carved out of stone or built with brick and lime.

Tunnels were lined with bones, mostly femurs and skulls. You had to dig around to find little pieces of scapulas and such.

The process was to use the rectangular tombs (shown above) to place coffins on top of each other, separated by earth and lime to accelerate the decomposition process, avoid epidemics, and bad odors. I have to admit it smelled a little stale but you’d never know there were over 25,000 bodies down there. I did entertain the fleeting thought of trying to count a coffin’s worth of femurs, divide by two just to do some estimating on my own.

Every place you looked, there they were.

As we traversed deeper and deeper into the catacombs, ducking our heads to get through passageways I started to spend more time checking out the brick work over my head. How much weight is above us day after day trying to crush this place? I’ve done my homework and Lima gets a 8.0M or greater earthquake on average every 30 years. Hmmmmm…..now I start checking out the locations of emergency lighting…hahahaha….clearly marked exits…hahahaha….yeah…this is not the place I want to be when the next big one hits.

It’s easy to forget about being crushed during the next earthquake when you come upon sights like this. I did take the precautionary step of putting my glasses in my pocket before I leaned over the side. I didn’t want to be *that* American that had to climb down in the cistern and get his glasses. Tammy would be so embarrassed.

Heading back to our little apartment we were both talking about the catacombs being the highlight of the day. I opened the door and went in, starting to untie my sneakers. “Hey, blue eyes…be sure to wipe your feet….we may have some…you know…left on us.”