Convent of San Francisco, Lima

Convent of San Francisco, Lima tickets: which one to buy

Entry is by guided tour only and the ticket is cheap; tours leave every twenty to thirty minutes in Spanish and English and take about an hour, covering the church, the cloisters, the library and the catacombs. There is no way to wander alone. Tickets are bought at the door and queues form at weekends and in the late morning. Photography inside is forbidden on the standard tour, which disappoints many visitors; a separate photography permit is sold at certain times.

Lima city tours nearly always include the convent and cost several times the entry, adding the Plaza Mayor, the cathedral and often a colonial house. Night tours of the catacombs run occasionally and are the atmospheric option. The complex is in the historic centre, ten minutes on foot from the main square, and the area is busy by day and best left by taxi after dark. Tours in English run less often than Spanish ones, so ask at the desk which is leaving next rather than waiting for a scheduled slot.

Visiting Convent of San Francisco, Lima: what to see

The Franciscans were given this plot after Pizarro founded Lima in 1535, and the present church and convent were built from 1546 and finished in the seventeenth century, surviving the earthquakes that flattened most of colonial Lima. The facade is Spanish baroque in yellow and white, and inside the church keeps carved choir stalls of the 1670s in Nicaraguan cedar. The cloister is lined with seventeenth-century Sevillian azulejos and a painted cycle of the life of St Francis.

The library holds about 25,000 volumes, some printed before 1600, shelved in a long vaulted room with rolling ladders; it looks exactly as a colonial monastic library should. Beneath it all are the catacombs, used as the city cemetery until 1808, where the bones of an estimated 25,000 people are stacked in brick-lined wells and passages, femurs and skulls arranged in patterns in the lowest chamber. The tour walks through them in single file. The Moorish coffered ceiling over the main staircase, carved in 1625 from Nicaraguan cedar, is the finest mudejar work in South America.

Convent of San Francisco, Lima opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from mid-morning to early evening, with the last tour leaving an hour before closing. Weekday mornings are quietest; Sunday afternoons bring local families. Lima's coastal fog, the garua, hangs over the city from June to October and makes the interiors dark; the summer months from December to March are bright and hot. The catacombs are low, narrow and humid, with uneven floors, and are not suitable for anyone claustrophobic or unsteady.

There is no dress code. Allow ninety minutes for the tour. The square outside is full of pigeons and photographers, and the church of San Francisco is one of the few colonial buildings in Lima that looks much as it did in 1700. The basilica has its own free entrance for worshippers, and the early evening mass is the one time visitors see the church in use rather than on tour.