Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
OFFLINE MAP
(admission US$2; 8:30am-5:30pm Mon-Fri, 9am-4pm Sat & Sun)
The oldest church in Central
boasts a robin's-egg-blue birthday-cake facade and houses one of the best museums in the
region. Originally constructed in 1585, it was subsequently burned to the ground by pir-
ates and later William Walker, rebuilt in 1868 and restored in 1989.
The museum is through the small door on the left, where guides (some of whom speak
English) are available for tours; tips are appreciated. Museum highlights include top-notch
Primitivist art, a scale model of the city and a group of papier-mâché indigenous people
cooking, relaxing in hammocks and swinging on
comelazatoaztegams,
a sort of
360-degree seesaw.
The reason you're here, however, is the Zapatera statuary, two solemn regiments of
black-basalt statues looming above large men and possessed of 10 times their gravity,
carved between AD 800 and 1200, then left behind on the ritual island of Zapatera. Most
were discovered in the late 1880s and gathered in Granada in the 1920s.
