Colonial-Era Hospital and Church Excavated in Lima

LIMA, PERU—According to a report in The Art Newspaper, traces of a sixteenth-century hospital and church have been found in Lima’s historic district, at the sanctuary of Santa Rosa de Lima, a Roman Catholic saint who lived next door to the structure when she died in 1617. “While performing maintenance on one of the exterior gardens of the sanctuary, we decided to conduct an archaeological search, because we knew that the Church and Hospital of the Holy Spirit had once stood there—and we found them!” said Luis Martín Bogdanovich Mendoza of the Municipal Program for the Recovery of the Historic Center of Lima (Prolima). The hospital was founded in 1573 by a Greek merchant to care for seafarers and their families. Each room had a small altar so that the patients could hear mass while in bed. Bogdanovich and his colleagues unearthed a cobblestone floor at the entrance to the hospital, brick floors, and walls made of river stone. Several burials were also found under the floor of the main chapel. Tiles made in Valencia, Spain, have been dated to the eighteenth century. “Valencia was a major exporter of tiles and textiles during the Spanish colonial period,” Bogdanovich explained. The church was eventually deconsecrated in the mid-nineteenth century and the building was demolished in the 1940s. To read about pre-colonial religion at an archaeological site just south of Lima, go to "Idol of the Painted Temple."