museum tagged posts

In America, Bolivia 2001 On  11/07/2001  One comment

I left at 9am to a tour in Tiahuanaco. In the way we stopped in the small city called Laja to visit the Baroque Mestizo style church. This was created to commemorate the victory of the Spaniard on the Incas. On the left side, there are Inca symbols as the condor, while on the right there are catholic symbols. The visit the Tiahuanaco starts in the local museum that shows indigenous objects from the region. We learned a little about the pre-Colombian cultures and went for a walk in the ruins.

Tiahuanaco was perhaps the most important culture in Bolivia. It was divided in 5 phases, the first it is believed it appeared 10 centuries before Christ, while that fifth it finished around 1200 DC. After this time the Incas arrived in the region and they took care of the temples.  Popular legends say that Viracocha (the greatest God, creator of the world) lived there...

In America, Peru 2001 On  13/06/2001  No comments

In Lima I visited the “Museo Nacional de Antropologia y Arqueologia”, located in Plaza Bolívar, a typical square of small city surrounded by colored colonial building. The museum shows the different phases of the indigenous cultures in Peru. Each culture is represented with the map of its region, time they had lived, its ceramics, clothing, mummies, skeletons… One of the attractions of the museum is the maquette of Machu Pichu where it shows how civilization worked. It has bulbs that light up showing what was each place in the construction.

The same day I visited the “Museo del Oro del Peru y Armas del Mundo”. The first floor you get in is a room full of rifles, knives, swords, digging, uniforms, armors, all possible warlike material, all in great amounts. I think I had never seen so many weapons together in my life. I did not like it at all, I felt suffocated and I left. I went to a handcraft store.

After some time, I came back and went to the basement to see the golden obje...

In America, Ecuador 2001 On  15/05/2001  No comments

Today I passed the day in the museums. As it was an ugly cloudy day, in the morning I visited the museum Antiguo Cuartel of la Real Audiencia in the center of the city. The building was restored and has a great collection of sacred art. University students guide the visit showing the different faces of the museum. The majority of the pictures did not have author, according to the guide it is because they were done by mestizos and indians, and these did not have the right to sign their paintings.

On the afternoon I visited the Casa de la Cultura, a complex with diverse exhibition halls, museum and cinema. The Museo Nacional has an excellent display of art from pre-Columbian period to nowadays. Here it impressed me their organization to the pre-Columbian art area. This art is displayed in dark rooms, black walls, shown inside of illuminated windows. It is all catalogued by tribe and time. Together, there are maps of the Ecuador showing the region where the tribe inhabited...

In America, Ecuador 2001 On  29/04/2001  No comments

The Mitad del Mundo city is about 15km away from Quito. It is the landmark of latitude zero. Very small, it looks like a hole surrounded by mountains. On Sundays it is crowded with tourists, the great majority is local tourists who go to visit the monument, the museum and walk around the place. Sometimes there are music and dance performances. Unfortunately I couldn’t see it because the performance was cancelled due to the rain.

Some people say that the monument is not on latitude zero. They say the calculus of the location is wrong, but once there, people say that the equator line marked in the ground is correct. Inside of the tower there is an ethnographic museum. People go up by elevator and go down by stairs seeing an exhibition about the indigenous culture of Ecuador. The museum is small but well organized. There are maps of each region and models showing the clothing of each tribe...