Lampa: The vermillion city of the blue windows

 

story of a murder

Lampa is an old city near my own city, in Lampa’s Province, in the heart of Puno’s region in Peru, at 3930 meters of altitude (12 893 ft.), it’s quite old but Spaniards re-founded it in 1678. This is called “The Pink City” or “The City of the Seven Wonders”… pink city for the color of the walls but to me they are more vermillion so I titled that way this article; it’s a small city so I don’t know which are those seven wonders, lol.

These photographs were took in 2007 with my first camera I was still one year away to end the university and I had the Hewlett Packard camera that my older brother gave me. So if you don’t tolerate noise I caution you to don’t continue if you care about your eyes XD

THE CITY

door to magician home

walking beyond the city surely we’ll find a heaven

caressing  your vermillion skin

to squeeze my nose

let’s go

waiting…

man with monocle

walls before the long night

It looks empty but that’s because the population works in Juliaca and sleep there, so today it’s more a bedroom city. When Spaniards founded it the population was white, but after the Tupac Amaru’s revolution whites left the city and went to the coast.

SANTIAGO APÓSTOL TEMPLE

let’s build a church made of colors

The church is a colonial building dedicated to Saint James, sadly the complete name is “Saint James the Indian Killer”, and Spanish descendants consider us as “Indians” Of course I couldn’t adore, reverence or respect a figure meant to kill us o.O!! But the building is nice.

a closed door

In fact I saw the facade analyzed by an Italian architect in a classic text at university, the arch unifying the diverse elements under it.

gentle light upon the old stones

fields of happy green

a last bit of light

unlimited spaces surrounding the building

There is a mystery, although I think it’s more a secret, about why the tower is so far from the main body of the temple. I guess for some structural reason, but that’s just a thought.

intimate garden

My road of infinite geometry

ART AND NATURE

European echoes

The city hall has a copy, supposedly the only one on the world, of the Pietà of Michelangelo. That day everything was closed so I photographed from the window. I’ve seen it before when I was a kid, I liked it so much.

falling into infinite lines beyond the light

I found this green beauty inside the city hall. I like the idea of infinite.

sleeping Venus

This is a Venus found near Lampa, it seems we occupied it from several thousands of years ago. Our society, the native side at least, is a patriarchal-matriarchal one.

Fight!

c’mon! you want to climb me :D

These trees are a native species that in Aymara we call “Qiñwa”, in Spanish it’s called “queñual” and in English you would call it Polylepis. I climbed them once, they’ve such a texture! :-)

END

And well, this was part of that afternoon. We, my parents and brothers, took a bus to come back to Juliaca city.

a sky so close to us