Spanish colonists founded Arequipa in 1540 in a fertile valley beneath the volcanoes Misti, Chachani, and Pichu Pichu. Builders quickly adopted sillar, the pale volcanic stone that gave the settlement its enduring White City identity. A grid of streets, a central plaza, churches, convents, and courtyard houses established the colonial center, while Indigenous masons and artists adapted European designs to Andean materials, seismic conditions, and decorative traditions. Repeated earthquakes made rebuilding a central part of the city’s architectural history from its earliest decades.

Santa Catalina Monastery began in 1579 after the viceregal authorities approved a Dominican convent for women. María de Guzmán, a wealthy widow, entered the new institution and surrendered her property to it. The community drew many daughters of prosperous Spanish and creole families, some accompanied by servants and housed in private cells resembling small dwellings. Over time, chapels, cloisters, kitchens, streets, and service courts filled an entire urban block, creating a secluded religious district within the larger colonial city.

Earthquakes in 1600, 1604, 1687, 1784, and later years damaged both Arequipa and the monastery. Much of the monastery visible today reflects seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reconstruction rather than its first buildings. Thick sillar walls, low vaults, buttresses, and compact spaces answered the region’s seismic risk, while painted red and blue surfaces, carved portals, and religious art gave the interior its distinctive character. The complex also records reforms that gradually replaced the relatively independent households of wealthy nuns with stricter communal observance.

Arequipa expanded beyond its colonial core during the republican era, but the Plaza de Armas, cathedral precinct, convents, bridges, and many sillar residences remained the historic center’s defining fabric. Restoration has followed successive earthquakes, including major twentieth- and twenty-first-century events, so individual buildings combine colonial masonry with repaired, replaced, and strengthened sections. Santa Catalina remained closed to outsiders until 1970, when most of the compound opened for visits while a smaller Dominican community continued cloistered life in a reserved area.

UNESCO inscribed Arequipa’s historic center in 2000 for an architectural tradition that joins European planning and design with Indigenous craftsmanship and a dramatic volcanic landscape. The protected district is a living city rather than a preserved colonial tableau: civic, commercial, residential, and religious uses continue amid conservation pressures and earthquake preparation. Santa Catalina operates partly as an active convent and partly as a museum. Its importance lies in the surviving and reconstructed sillar environment, the documented community of women who shaped it, and the broader urban history surrounding it.