Arequipa, the white city under the volcanoes

Arequipa sits in a green valley in the south of Peru, at about 2,300 metres, beneath a ring of volcanoes. The nearest and most famous, El Misti, rises in an almost perfect snow-capped cone directly above the city, with Chachani and Pichu Pichu to either side. The volcanoes have shaped the city in more ways than one. Its colonial buildings are made of sillar, a pale volcanic rock formed from compacted ash, which is easy to carve and gives the centre its gleaming white appearance, and its nickname, the White City.

The volcanoes have also been a danger. Arequipa has been badly damaged by earthquakes several times in its history, and Misti is still active, though it has not erupted in a major way for centuries.

The city

Arequipa was founded by the Spanish in 1540, and its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. At its heart is the Plaza de Armas, one of the finest main squares in South America, lined on three sides by two-storey arcades of white stone and on the fourth by the long facade of the cathedral, with its twin towers, framed by Misti behind. In the evening, when the stone glows in the setting sun and the arcades fill with people, it is a lovely place to sit.

The city's churches are decorated in a distinctive style known as mestizo baroque, in which indigenous craftsmen carved their own motifs into Spanish designs: tropical fruit, flowers, birds and faces among the saints and angels. The facade of the Jesuit church, La Compañía, is a fine example.

Santa Catalina

The most remarkable sight in Arequipa is the Monastery of Santa Catalina, a convent founded in 1579 that occupies a whole block of the city centre. Behind its high walls is a small town of streets, squares, cloisters, kitchens, chapels and cells, painted in strong blues, reds and ochres, with geraniums in pots and fountains in the courtyards.

For centuries, the nuns lived here in seclusion, many of them the daughters of wealthy Spanish families, who brought with them servants, furniture and dowries. The convent was closed to the outside world until 1970, when the nuns, by then a small community, opened most of it to visitors to pay for its upkeep. A few nuns still live in one corner of it. Walking its quiet lanes, from the sunlit cloisters to the dark cells, is like stepping back into colonial Peru.

Juanita, and the food

Arequipa has another unusual sight. In 1995, on the summit of the nearby volcano Ampato, climbers found the frozen body of a young Inca girl, sacrificed on the mountain more than five hundred years ago and preserved by the ice. She is known as Juanita, or the Ice Maiden, and she is displayed, in a refrigerated case, at the Museo Santuarios Andinos, part of the year, along with the offerings found with her.

The city is also known for its food, a cuisine of its own, served in traditional restaurants called picanterías: rocoto relleno, a spicy red pepper stuffed with meat, chupe de camarones, a rich river prawn soup, and adobo, a pork stew eaten on Sunday mornings. Arequipeños are proud of their city and its food, and fond of saying, only half in jest, that they are a separate republic.

The tours

Explore Worldwide's Simply Peru, thirteen nights, travels from Lima to the Nazca lines and Arequipa, then to Chivay and the Colca Canyon, Puno and Taquile Island on Lake Titicaca, and Cusco, with Aguas Calientes and Ollantaytambo. It runs from March to May and from July to October.

Explore's Upgraded: Discover Peru + the Amazon, seventeen nights, adds Lima's Barranco district, and continues from Arequipa and the Colca Canyon to Puno and Lake Titicaca, Cusco and the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu and the Amazon at Puerto Maldonado.

Arequipa has a dry, sunny climate for most of the year, with rain mainly in the summer months of January to March. It is a good place to start a journey into the southern Andes, since its altitude is high enough to begin acclimatising, but low enough to be comfortable.