Museo de Minerales Andrés del Castillo

This guide to the Museo de Minerales Andres del Castillo in Lima follows Guido del Castillo, a Peruvian mining engineer who bought a crumbling seventeenth-century mansion downtown in 2006 after his son Andres, a mining engineering student, died at twenty-six. You'll hear how Guido poured decades of gold-mining work into roughly three thousand crystallized minerals gathered from Pasco, Piura, Cusco and Puno, and hung them alongside pre-Hispanic textiles and Chancay ceramics saved by the same restoration. Best seen in the darkened ultraviolet room, where calcites and halides glow green and orange among the aragonites and azurite.