Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Venezuela and Brazil: the colonial churches and convents of Quito, Bogota, Lima and Mexico City, Cartagena de Indias and the castles of Uruguay.
30 programs
West of Buenos Aires, the basilica of Lujan rises above a low-built town in twin neo-Gothic spires. It shelters the venerated image of Our Lady of Lujan, patroness of Argentina, and draws one of the largest pilgrimages in the Americas, made largely on foot.
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The cathedral of La Plata was conceived with the planned city it crowns: a vast neo-Gothic church built in exposed brick, among the largest of its kind in the Americas. Begun in the 1880s, it waited more than a century for its twin towers to be completed.
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North of Buenos Aires, the Parana delta breaks into a maze of brown channels reached only by boat. At its edge, Tigre and its Puerto de Frutos, once a landing for fruit, timber and wicker from the islands, has become one of the region's liveliest markets.
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Dedicated to Saint Joseph, honoured in the Catholic tradition as the patron of workers and of families, this Brazilian church is observed as a place of daily use: its facade, its altars, its images, and the congregation that gives it its rhythm through the week.
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Walls, bastions and a fortress on the hill protect a colonial city of balconies, plazas and churches. Cartagena de Indias, inscribed on the World Heritage List, is filmed as port, stronghold and living town.
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Facing Bogotá's principal square, the Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica presents a sober neoclassical front and a vast, luminous interior. The film follows its architecture, its chapels and its civic role.
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In the historic centre of the Colombian capital, this colonial church combines a plain exterior with a carefully kept interior of altarpieces and images, still visited daily by the faithful.
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Founded by the Dominican order in the Spanish colonial period, the Church of Santo Domingo pairs a heavy, sober exterior with a nave of altarpieces, sculpture and painted decoration.
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Once the church of a community of cloistered nuns, Santa Clara is today a museum: a single nave under a decorated vault, hung with colonial paintings and polychrome sculpture.
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Twin towers, flying buttresses and stone beasts drawn from the fauna of Ecuador: the Basilica of the National Vow is the boldest religious building of the Andean capital.
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A Carmelite church and convent in Quito's old city, where enclosed religious life left behind altarpieces, painted images and the discreet architecture of separation.
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An Augustinian church and cloister in the World Heritage centre of Quito, whose chapter house is remembered as the room where Ecuador's act of independence was signed.
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Begun soon after the Spanish founding of Quito, San Francisco covers an entire quarter: church, cloisters, chapels and a great atrium, filled with the art of the Quito school.
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A carved volcanic-stone facade with twisted columns, and an interior of gilded vaults and altarpieces: La Compania is the most spectacular Baroque church of the Andes.
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Built on the slope of a valley below the Ecuadorian capital, the sanctuary of Guapulo holds altarpieces, colonial paintings and a celebrated carved pulpit.
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Facing the Plaza Grande, the Metropolitan Cathedral is one of the oldest in South America, a layered building of chapels, altarpieces and tombs at the centre of Ecuadorian history.
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North of Quito, a monument marks the equatorial line and commemorates the geodesic expedition that came to measure the shape of the Earth. Science, nation and tourism in one site.
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Set high in the Andes, Quito's historic core is one of the first sites ever inscribed on the World Heritage List. Part one follows its squares, churches and monumental architecture.
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Part two leaves the great squares for the working city: stepped streets, markets, workshops, festivals and the neighbourhoods that keep Quito's historic centre inhabited.
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Founded as a house of retreat, San Diego preserves a cloister with painted walls, a church of colonial altarpieces and a cemetery, now open to visitors as a convent-museum.
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The sandbar and lagoon of Cancun preserve several Maya archaeological sites. Modest in scale but revealing, they document a coastline organised around maritime trade long before the modern resort city existed.
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El Rey is the most extensive archaeological site on the Cancun sandbar: platforms, plazas and a small temple aligned along a central avenue, occupied in the late pre-Hispanic period and named after a sculpted figure found there.
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High in the mountains of San Luis Potosi, Real de Catorce was a wealthy silver town before the mines closed. Its church, reached through a long tunnel, remains a pilgrimage destination whose walls are covered with votive offerings.
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Dominating the Zocalo, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City took centuries to complete and combines Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical work. It stands on the site of the sacred precinct of the Aztec capital.
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A Mexican parish church placed under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the country. The film observes its architecture, its image of the Virgin and the devotional life of a congregation for whom this cult is central.
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Lima's Plaza Mayor was traced out when the city was founded in 1535, and its cathedral has been rebuilt again and again after the earthquakes that punctuate Peruvian history. Together they form the ceremonial heart of the capital's historic centre.
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Built for Francisco Piria, the entrepreneur who created the resort town of Piriapolis, this hillside residence combines Italianate grandeur with the esoteric interests of its owner. It is now a museum open to the public.
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Piriapolis was not so much founded as designed: a complete seaside resort laid out on the Uruguayan coast by the entrepreneur Francisco Piria, with a grand hotel, a promenade and hills rising directly behind the beach.
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On the Rambla in Montevideo stands the strangest building in the city: the labyrinthine residence of Humberto Pittamiglio, architect and student of alchemy, whose eclectic facade and symbol-laden interiors are now open as a cultural centre.
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Facing the principal square of Maracay, in the fertile Aragua valleys of northern Venezuela, the cathedral occupies the ground on which the town organised itself. Its white facade and bell towers remain the city's civic reference point.
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