San Francisco Monastery & Catacombs

The Basilica and Convent of San Francisco is the finest thing colonial Lima built and the strangest thing it hid: a canary-yellow Spanish Baroque church-and-monastery complex on the edge of the historic centre, so structurally cunning it has shrugged off the earthquakes that flattened everything around it since 1774, sitting over catacombs that hold the bones of an estimated 25,000 people. It is a UNESCO World Heritage centrepiece, the best-preserved colonial religious complex in the city, and the rare monument where the architecture upstairs and the ossuary downstairs are equally unforgettable.

The above-ground tour is a Golden Age inventory. The main cloister runs Sevillian azulejo tilework from the 1620s beneath carved cedar; the choir stalls are Moorish-influenced marquetry; and the library — the showstopper — is a two-storey Baroque reading room of spiral staircases and 25,000 antique volumes, some predating the conquest, under a ceiling that stops visitors mid-step. The convent museum holds a Zurbarán series and a Last Supper where the apostles dine on Andean guinea pig, the colonial painter's quiet act of localisation. Then the descent: the catacombs, Lima's main cemetery until 1808, a subterranean network of brick-lined galleries where the bones — femurs and skulls, disinterred and sorted by type over centuries — are arranged in geometric patterns, wells of the dead laid out in concentric circles. It is macabre, beautiful and genuinely old, and the low passages are not for the claustrophobic.

Craft: the interior is guided-only (photography restricted, especially in the catacombs — put the phone away and look), the tours run roughly every half hour in several languages, and the walking-tour products bundle it with the surrounding Centro Histórico — the Plaza Mayor, the cathedral, the balconied colonial streets — which is the correct way to see it, since the monastery anchors the old city's eastern edge. Go mid-morning before the tour groups thicken, allow an hour for both levels, and pair it with a Centro lunch; the historic centre empties and shutters early, so front-load the day.