Above: Detail of a side altar of Templo Santo Domingo de Guzman
Spare words are being offered. We have visited Santo Domingo so many times through the years, yet we are still always gob-smacked by her beauty.
Many others are as well, making the dawn-of-the-17th-century Baroque church a magnet for destination weddings. A four-year age-defying face-lift undertaken in the 1990s successfully masks her age.
Above: A few details of the gilded interior of Templo de Santo Domingo
The temple and its adjacent ex convento are both part of a compound collectively referred to as Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca. Inside the former monastery walls, effigies of gods native to the Americas reside under ceilings built in adoration of the new god imported by the Spanish.
Above: Photos inside the Ex Convento of Santo Domingo, part of the Museum of Cultures
The rare books contained in the museum’s Fray Francisco de Burgoa Library fall under the auspices of the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca. What I’d never noticed on prior visits was a framed painting almost casually placed atop a bookshelf – a painting by one of Mexico’s great muralists, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974).
And I always love the patron saint of eyesight, Santa Lucia, greeting all who enter the ex convento.
Postcards from Barton Springs 