The Dominicans and colonial Oaxaca

After the Spanish conquest the town of Antequera, today's Oaxaca, was laid out on a grid from 1529, and Dominican friars led the conversion of the Zapotec and Mixtec peoples. Their church and monastery of Santo Domingo, begun in the 1570s, is lined inside with gilded baroque stucco. Used as army barracks for more than a century after the 1850s reform laws, it now houses the regional museum.