About Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán

The Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, in the historic centre of Oaxaca City, Mexico, began construction in the 1570s, following the city’s 1551 grant of land to the Dominican order, with friars occupying the still-unfinished complex in 1608 after their previous convent, San Pablo, was destroyed by an earthquake. Repeated earthquake damage halted work over the following decades, and the complex — including its celebrated Rosary Chapel, built between 1724 and 1731 — was not fully finished until well into the 18th century. The church’s plain, fortress-like exterior, thick-walled and built in the earthquake-resistant style typical of colonial Mexican churches, conceals one of the most extravagantly decorated Baroque interiors anywhere in the Americas, its walls and vaults covered almost entirely in gilded polychrome stucco. Just inside the entrance, above the choir loft, a famous gilded stucco genealogical tree begins with a reclining figure of Félix de Guzmán, father of Saint Dominic, set within a shell-shaped niche, its golden branches rising through the Guzmán lineage toward a culminating image of the Virgin of the Rosary holding the Christ child, surrounded by thirty-six painted panels depicting biblical and Marian scenes. The adjoining former convent now houses the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, home to the extraordinary Mixtec treasure recovered from Tomb 7 at the archaeological site of Monte Albán, discovered by archaeologist Alfonso Caso in 1932: roughly 600 objects in gold, silver, turquoise, jade and other precious materials, including the celebrated turquoise mosaic skull, one of the richest archaeological finds ever made in the Americas.