I was a little bit surprised that I spent 2 hours in the grounds of Hotel Casa Santo Domingo. I had no idea was laid before me. 

Yes, it took only a little bit of working out that I had to go into the hotel to discover what was there. So I just wandered the corridors / pathways, up stairs and down underground to explored the various nooks and crannies of this site. Well just stayed in the public area. Soon I heard the sound of singing and a church service was in progress in the restored church. Just magic and I hope that you can get the feeling in the photos. Perhaps I should have taken a short video clip of the singing. The church has been rebuilt on the same site and with the high canvas sail like roof, but with the remaining ruins still around it, the place had this wonderful positive mystic feeling. Many of the songs / hymns I knew but was in another language.

After the service had finished I kept on exploring and quickly enjoyed the peace and serenity of the whole place.

In their main plaza it seemed like a wedding was about to begin judging by the set up and way the guests were dressed. I was a bit under dressed!

So thanks Bec for this highlight of today.

Wish I could stay here tonight instead of in my tiny windowless room.

The Hotel Casa Santo Domingo is a noted 5 star hotel and museum in Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala. It is located in the grounds of the Santo Domingo Monastery, which was once a stronghold of one of the most grand convents in the Americas. This monastery was partially destroyed in the 1773 Santa Marta earthquake. The hotel is notable in that it preserves the architecture from the baroque period of ancestral America and contains a number of treasures from this period on display.

The hotel opened in June 1989. Thanks Mr Wikipedia.

Taken from the hotel web site, these were the main museums that I went into:

The Museums Promenade is a cultural route created by an agreement between San Carlos de Guatemala University and Hotel Casa Santo Domingo. It is a route that makes it possible to visit the museums installed in what was the church and convent of Santo Domingo and Santo Tomás de Aquino (Saint Thomas Aquinas) College. During the time of the Spanish domination these places constituted one single unit.

The Colonial Museum contains works produced during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It includes religious paintings, silver pieces such as lecterns, crowns, mostrances and chalices; sculptures in domestic woods and great format of archangels, saints, virgins, cherubs, spirits, and painted metals.

The Archeology Museum exhibits ceramic and stone objects such as feminine figures, vases, plates, bowls, funerary urns, thuribles, ceremonial batchets and yokes that mostly correspond to the Classic Period (200-900 AD) of the Mayan Culture. It also has a collection of colonial ceramic jugs that were probably used to store grains or liquids.

The Museum of pre-Columbian art and modern glass offers a comparative sample of Pre-Hispanic objects manufactured in ceramics, stone and other recent glass pieces.