Pilgrimage Sites in Peru

The Basilica of Santo Domingo in Lima, the oldest Dominican foundation in the Americas, holds the relics of three saints who lived in the same convent within a single generation: Martin de Porres, Rose of Lima and John Macías. Rose was the first person born in the Americas to be canonised, in 1671. The colonial churches of the capital — the Cathedral, San Francisco with its catacombs, Las Nazarenas with the Señor de los Milagros — stand in a historic centre inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Northern Peru keeps devotions of its own, all in the department of Lambayeque. On a hill above Motupe, in the carob lowlands, a cross of guayacán wood found in a grotto in 1868 draws around 700,000 pilgrims a year; they climb 1,466 concrete steps to reach it, and every August the town comes out to receive it. At Ciudad Eten, known as the Eucharistic City, the figure of a child appeared in the consecrated host raised in the parish church on the vigil of Corpus Christi in 1649 — the one Eucharistic miracle recorded in Peru. In Chiclayo, the region's seat, the Shrine Monastery of Our Lady of Peace and the Cathedral of Santa María on the main square serve the diocese's pilgrims.

In the southern Andes, at some 3,400 metres, Cusco was the capital of the Inca empire before it became the seat of the first bishopric in Spanish South America, erected in 1537. Its Cathedral keeps the dark-skinned crucified Christ the city calls the Señor de los Temblores, the Lord of the Earthquakes, and its sworn patron. On the Monday of Holy Week he is carried out through the streets, and tens of thousands fill the Plaza de Armas to receive his blessing.