San Francisco de Lima: A Church the Earthquakes Remade, and the Catacombs Beneath It

San Francisco stands two blocks from the Plaza Mayor, at the corner of Jirón Lampa and Jirón Áncash, behind a small square. From the street you see a long front with two towers and, between them, a carved grey stone portal. Behind it are a church, a convent, cloisters and, beneath the floors, the catacombs most visitors come for. It is stop seven of the Historic Center: The City of Kings, Rebuilt walk, which reads the front from Jirón Lampa across the square and leaves the ticketed interior to you.

A church the earthquakes remade

The Franciscans settled at this corner in 1546, eleven years after Lima was founded. The church you see is the one they began after the earthquake of 1655. Its first stone was laid in 1657, to plans by the Portuguese Constantino de Vasconcelos, built by Manuel de Escobar, and it was consecrated in 1672. The portal between the towers, a carved stone front designed like an altarpiece, was finished about 1674. Guidebooks credit its design to Vasconcelos and its carving to Escobar, but no document has been found to back that up.

The church did not come through the next earthquake unscathed. In 1687 its brick vaults broke, and they were rebuilt in light materials: wood, cane and plaster. The third tier of the front was rebuilt in the early eighteenth century. This was the answer Lima gave its earthquakes again and again: take the weight off the top.

Not always yellow

San Francisco's yellow and white front is one of the most photographed in Lima, and the colour is recent. A colour study by PROLIMA, the city's historic-center programme, reported in 2018 that the church has been yellow for about seventy years and was white and black for much longer than that. Like much of the center, it looks timeless and is not.

UNESCO describes the convent as the largest of its type in this part of the world. When the historic center of Lima was first put on the World Heritage List, in 1988, it was this convent that was inscribed; the listing was extended to the wider center in 1991. UNESCO also notes that the construction of Avenida Abancay in 1940 whittled away at the convent's immense grounds.

The catacombs

For most of Lima's colonial history the dead were buried in and under its churches. Burials beneath San Francisco went on until the city's cemetery, the Presbítero Maestro, opened in 1808. The common estimate is about 25,000 burials; treat larger figures, such as 70,000, with suspicion. What is certain is that tens of thousands of Limeños lie in the chambers under the church, their bones now laid out in rows and patterns.

Several stories cling to the catacombs, and none has a source: that they were forgotten and then found when workers broke through a wall in 1943, that tunnels connect them to the cathedral and other churches, that the bones were arranged into their patterns at a known date in the nineteenth century, or that grates in the church floor open onto them. Enjoy them as stories. The bones need no embellishment.

Visiting

The convent museum and the catacombs can be seen only on a guided visit of about forty-five minutes, in Spanish and English, with no photographs in the catacombs. There is no official price or schedule online: press reports from 2021 to 2024 gave about 15 soles for adults, and the hours quoted differ, so ask at the convent's ticket office and do not trust websites that claim to sell tickets. The church itself is free.

The small square in front of the church, the Plazuela de San Francisco, has been a worksite: the city restarted its restoration on 5 January 2026, expecting about five months, and no completion had been reported when we checked on 6 October 2026. Hoardings may hide the lower part of the front, but the towers and the upper front show over them.

From San Francisco the walk carries on to the old Desamparados railway station, now the Casa de la Literatura, and to the Plaza Mayor. Come back for the catacombs when you have forty-five minutes to spare, and read how the rest of the center was rebuilt.