Hotel Monasterio

Two blocks from the Plaza de Armas in Cusco, on the Plazoleta Nazarenas, a carved stone doorway leads into a cloister where a cedar tree has grown for three centuries. Hotel Monasterio, A Belmond Hotel occupies the former Seminary of San Antonio Abad, founded in 1592, and its walls stand on the foundations of the palace of the Inca Amaru Qhala. The altitude is 3,400 metres, which is why the hotel pipes oxygen into some of its rooms.

History

The seminary was established in 1592 under Bishop Antonio de la Raya to train priests for the diocese of Cusco, and it was built over the Inca palace whose stonework shows in the lower courses. The earthquake of 1650 brought much of it down, and the rebuilding gave the complex its baroque chapel and the two cloisters that survive. The seminary functioned for almost four centuries. In 1995 the building was converted into a luxury hotel in Cusco and opened under Orient-Express Hotels, which had entered Peru with the PeruRail concession and a joint venture with the Peruvian company Peru Hotels. It became Belmond Hotel Monasterio in 2014. The building is a national monument.

Architecture and design

The plan is that of a colonial seminary: a main cloister with arcades on two levels, a second cloister beyond, and the chapel on the street side. The chapel keeps its gilded altar and Cusco School paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the hotel's corridors hang more of the same, which gives the public rooms the feel of a museum. The cedar in the main cloister is the hotel's emblem. Rooms were fitted into the former cells and classrooms, with thick walls and small windows onto the cloisters.

Rooms and suites

There are around 120 rooms and suites. Some open onto the cloisters, others onto the inner courtyards, and the suites include rooms with original ceilings and a few with a terrace. A number of rooms can be enriched with oxygen to ease the first nights at altitude, a service the hotel introduced early and which other Cusco hotels have copied. Heating matters as much: nights fall close to freezing in the dry season from May to September, and every room has it.

Dining

El Tupay, the main restaurant, serves Peruvian and international dishes in a vaulted room and stages short opera recitals on some evenings. Illary, in the cloister, handles breakfast and lunch, with tables under the arcades in good weather. The Lobby Bar serves pisco sours, and the Deli Monasterio sells pastries and coffee on the plaza side.

Weddings and events

The hotel hosts weddings with ceremonies in the chapel, receptions in the cloisters and dinner in its function rooms. Meetings and conferences use a set of rooms off the second cloister, and groups arriving for Machu Picchu often combine a dinner here with the train the next morning. Names and capacities of the rooms should be confirmed with the hotel.

Location

The hotel stands on the Plazoleta Nazarenas, two blocks uphill from the Plaza de Armas and next to its sister, Palacio Nazarenas, which opened in 2012 in a former convent. Cusco's Alejandro Velasco Astete airport is about five kilometres away, 20 minutes by car. Trains to Machu Picchu leave from Poroy, 30 minutes from the city, or from Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley, 90 minutes away. The cathedral, the Qorikancha and the San Blas quarter are all on foot from the door.