El Carmen Alto belongs to the dense network of convents that shaped the historic centre of Quito, a district inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Its street front is sober, a stone doorway, high blank walls, small openings, exactly the architecture of enclosure, but inside the church opens onto gilded altarpieces, polychrome sculpture and paintings of the Quito school, the workshops whose religious images travelled across colonial South America. Grilles, screens and turning boxes mark the boundary between the nuns and the outside world, and they are among the most eloquent objects on screen: architecture as a rule of life. The episode films the interior in careful detail, follows the survival of a monastic community into the present, and situates the building in a city whose skyline is still governed by convent towers and cloister roofs.
