Templo del San Blas
Colonial church famed for a single cedar-trunk pulpit carved with more than eighty tumbling figures.
This guide to the Templo del San Blas in Cusco opens with a question: why does a human skull sit at the foot of a carved saint on this church's famous cedar pulpit? Tradition names the carver, Juan Tomás Tuyru Túpac, a leprosy sufferer who dreamed of a woman ringed in stars and found a buried painting of the Virgin near this plaza, and who, cured, vowed to carve the church a pulpit for nothing in return, spending years turning a single cedar trunk into more than eighty tumbling saints, cherubs and skulls. Near the end of the job, though, he broke his own vow and asked the bishop for money. Historians still debate whether he was even the true carver.
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