The Augustinian complex of San Agustin is one of the major religious ensembles of Quito's historic centre, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Its church presents a monumental stone facade and an interior of gilded altarpieces and colonial paintings, while beside it a two-storey cloister of carved arcades encloses one of the calmest spaces in the city. The convent also carries a decisive political memory: its chapter house is remembered as the room where the act that began Ecuador's separation from Spain was signed, which makes the building at once a monastery, a museum of colonial art and a national lieu de memoire. The episode works these registers in turn, the architecture and its craftsmanship, the paintings and their subjects, and the historical narrative that draws Ecuadorian visitors to a room whose furniture and silence are unchanged.
