The phrase “The Golden Age of Spain” is one that is deeply familiar to me from my childhood. My mother was born in Antofagasta, in Chile, and as a boy I was brought up on books that told of the wonderful deeds of the explorers such as Christopher Columbus, and the conquistadors, men who, with a few companions, overthrew vast empires and claimed them for Spain, and, of course, for the Catholic faith. How thrilled I was that Columbus’s flagship was called the Santa Maria and that his first act on landing in the New World was to plant the Cross! How correspondingly disappointed I was to read about the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, an event that used to be seen as the end of the Golden Age, just as the reconquest of Granada in 1492 (the same year as Columbus’s first voyage) marked its opening. I will be forever grateful to my mother for bringing me up so politically incorrectly. The great excitement of history is with me still, and thus it is with intense interest I have just read about the most recent archaeological discoveries in Peru, as reported by the Daily Telegraph. Archaeologists have recently uncovered evidence of the mass sacrifice of children at a site called Las Llamas. We read: