The Convento de los Descalzos (Convent of the Barefoot) is a 16th-century Franciscan monastery north of the Rímac river, reached on foot along the Alameda de los Descalzos promenade. Its tranquil cloisters, infirmary, kitchen, and refectory have been preserved more or less as they were before secularisation in the 1800s — wooden benches, painted walls, and a refectory with the original long table laid for 30 monks.
The picture gallery contains over 300 paintings of the Cuzco school — Indigenous-Spanish religious works that were the dominant colonial pictorial tradition. The neighbourhood (Rímac) can be rough; take a taxi door-to-door.