Plaza de Armas y Catedral

The cathedral faces the square with a front dense in carved columns, foliage and faces, cut by local masons into volcanic rock soft enough to work with unusual freedom. It has no bell tower, and the reason is fiscal rather than aesthetic: an unfinished church paid no tax to the Spanish crown, so a good number of them across the Andes were simply never declared complete. Once you know that, you start noticing it elsewhere.

The square itself is paved, planted and busy: palms, lamp posts, benches and a fountain at the centre, with people crossing it at all hours. Peru named the whole historic centre a national monument, and UNESCO listed it in 1986 as a Historical and Cultural Heritage of the Americas.

An hour covers the square and the cathedral front. It sits at 2,750 metres in the middle of the city and is open to walk through at any time; most visitors take it together with the Cuarto del Rescate and the Belén complex, all within a few streets of one another. Late afternoon is when the carved stonework reads best, when the light is low enough to put the relief into shadow. During carnival in February this square is the centre of it, and nothing about the ordinary description applies.