Arequipa Culture & Language

Arequipa’s culture is urban, literary and architectural, with a distinct highland tradition in the canyon behind it.

Mestizo baroque

Sillar is soft enough to carve deeply, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masons used that to develop a style found nowhere else: European baroque structure covered in flat, dense relief that mixes Spanish motifs with Andean ones — maize, cantuta flowers, pumas, and figures in local dress. The facade of La Compania and the portals of Yanahuara and Cayma are the reference examples, and the style spread from here through the southern Andes.

Santa Catalina

The monastery is a complete surviving picture of colonial cloistered life — a walled quarter with its own streets and squares where nuns from wealthy families lived with servants and possessions until reforms in the 1870s imposed austerity. It opened to the public only in 1970.

Colca textiles

The embroidered hats and skirts of the canyon are elaborate, machine-embroidered now but following long-standing designs, and identify which group and often which village the wearer is from.

Sillar

The white stone is quarried in open cuts on the city’s edge, still partly by hand, in blocks sawn straight from the ash bed. It insulates well, is light enough to build thick walls without excessive load, and weathers to the pale grey-white that gives the centre its light. The quarries at Anashuayco can be visited and are worth it for the scale of the cuts alone.

Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in the city, and Arequipa has a strong publishing and bookshop culture.

Spanish is the working language, and Arequipa speaks a clear, somewhat formal variety that Peruvians consider distinctive — there is even a local slang, loncco, drawn from the rural districts.

Quechua and Aymara are spoken in the highlands and the canyon, with the Collagua and Cabana communities historically associated with each.

English is common in city hotels, agencies and restaurants and among guides, and much less so elsewhere.

Useful Spanish: buenos dias, cuanto cuesta, la cuenta por favor, picante for hot, and soroche for altitude sickness.

Useful Quechua: sulpayki for thank you.