The Andean Baroque Route is a picturesque half day tour outside the city of Cusco which primarily focuses on churches that belong to the Andean Baroque artistic movement, including the church of San Pedro de Andahuaylillas often called the “Sistine Chapel of the Americas”. The Andean Baroque Route takes in beautiful views, tall mountains, quaint villages and churches full of colorful paintings with lots of history. These rarely-visited churches are humble on the outside but impressive on the inside and were structured and designed to convert the local people of the Altiplano to Christianity during the Colonial times. The Andean Baroque Route in Cusco Specialist Guide Lisy Kuon Bright and early on Friday morning I met the rest of the group at the airport in Lima to catch our 6:35am flight to Cusco. Here we met Lisy Kuon, Aracari's specialist guide on Colonial History and Architecture, who would be our guide for the day. Lisy studied Humanities and Anthropology at the National University of Cusco and the University of Washington in Seattle, specialising in expressive anthropology, now known as visual culture, of the Southern Peruvian Andes from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Her focus for the last 40 years has been on colonial art from Cusco and Puno. Learn more about Lisy Kuon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU55hv_VSuk Departing Cusco As we were leaving Cusco, we passed through the San Sebastián district and Lisy pointed out the Iglesia de San Sebastián. As we traveled farther southeast away from Cusco the scenery transformed from urban to more and more green, mountainous, and rural. We passed through a small town called Oropesa, famous for baking bread in large ovens made out of wood and stone. Rumiqolca Archaelogical Site Our first stop was an archaeological site called Rumiqolca. In the 9th-12th centuries it functioned as an aqueduct that provided water to the city