Templo y Convento La Merced Cusco

This guide to the Templo y Convento La Merced in Cusco centers on the Custodia de la Merced, a golden monstrance set with over fifteen hundred diamonds and topped by a carved pearl the friars call one of the largest ever pulled from the sea. It follows the goldsmith Luis Ayala de Olmos, who hammered it upright in the sixteen hundreds, and the Mercedarian order that built it, founded to ransom Christian captives from pirates on a startling promise about what a friar owed if the money ran out. Once a year, on Holy Monday, the friars carry this treasure out of the cloister to meet a procession arriving from across the city.