After a lazy morning, we headed out to take a tour of some
of the church, monastic, and convent ruins that remain from the Santa Marta
earthquake in 1773. (The 1773 earthquake
resulted in the city being abandoned and the colonial capital moving to modern
day Ciudad Guatemala.) One of our stops
was the Convento Capuchinas, which was a convent for around two dozen
nuns in the 1700’s. The building and
grounds are quite large and includes a church space where the public would have
come for public mass. It is considered
the first apartment building in the Americas because the individual sleeping
chambers included toilets, although not flushable of course. It is also considered the first convent that
did not require families to provide a dowry to the church, so that it was
accessible to daughters of families with limited means.
As we wandered to find other ruins, we found a charming
restaurant, Fermente, where we had Indian samosas and a plate of three
dips. The owner was celebrating his 50th
birthday, so we were able to enjoy some live Reggae music and admire a birthday
cake designed to look like a pot of ratatouille, including Remy, the mouse from
the eponymous movie.
After our late lunch we continued our exploration, arriving at
Iglesia Catolica San Francisco el Grande in time for 5:00 PM mass. The inside is cavernous and simple but
beautiful. We stayed until the
eucharist. We didn’t understand all of
the service, as it was in Spanish, but we did recognize the reading from the
“Old Testament,” which was Abraham welcoming to his tent the passing strangers,
who tell him of Sarah being pregnant.
As we returned through Parque Central, we stumbled upon a
market even larger than Friday’s. After
a circuit around the park, we decided to sit behind the main stage of what was
the starting and ending point of la Carrera de Leyendas, the Legends
Race, which was a 10K run – at night on cobblestone streets! See the photos and video to give you a sense
of the numbers of people and activities.
As a city of 46,000 people, it was quite a turnout! While we waited for the first runners to
finish, we sat in a café and partook in some sweets. After cheering on a few of the runners as
they finished, we headed back to our apartment and ended our adventure of the
day.
Photos from the day:
 |
The church next door with its coat of arms
|
 |
Los Buhos in a store window
|
 |
| Bougainvillea growing over a convent wall |
 |
Inside the Courtyard of the Capuchins, an order of nuns that had very strict rules
|
 |
| This round space is the first "apartment building" in that each cell had its own toilet. The building is round so the Mother Abbess could keep an eye on all the nuns at once. |
 |
An architectural addition in the convent (?)
|
-----------------------
A "Chicken Bus" - yes, it used to be a school bus in the US. On some of them, you can even see the name of the school district the come from. Now turned into privately owned and operated public transportation. There is an entire movie about how they go from from school bus to chicken bus
here.
-----------------------------
Live music at a local restaurant Fermento
 |
Candy and snack seller outside another church
|
Getting ready for the big race, the 10 K of Legends, part of the Fiestas Reales de Santiago, a week-long cultural and community festival in Antigua. This is the first in three years, due to the pandemic.
 |
lollipops for sale!
|
 |
two of the runners getting ready
|
 |
| The blessing/cleansing of the runners? |
And there off!
