Santuarios Andinos Museum

This museum is evidently dedicated to the discovery of a mummy called “Princesa Juanita”, the ice princess. In 1995, an expedition discovered the head of this young Inca princess of 13 or 14 years old. She and another child were sacrificed 500 years ago on the glacier Nevado Ampato. The opulent clothes and the multitude of ritual objects that they were covered with, testify their social status and show that the probable reason of their deaths was to calm the anger of gods. By being trapped by ices, her cadaver, from the hair to the toenails, has been well conserved. She has been disclosed thanks to the eruption of a surrounding volcano that dissolved her ice cap. The museum is compounded of funeral and ritual objects that were around her and, at the end, as a reward, the two mummies of the young sacrificed girls are standing. A must-do.