Ruins of the Chan Chan pre-hispanic city

From the cold and high altitudes of the glaciers we continued our trip to down to the desert of the Moche Valley to visit the largest the ruins of the largest mud city of the Americas. I know.. when I heard about for the first time I thought about simple rectangular shaped houses without roofs made of mud and sand that would be far from impressive when compared to something as impressive as Pyramids in Egypt or Mayan archaeological sites of the Yucatan Peninsula - but I was glad to notice how wrong I was.

This is the view to the desert from our bus.




The settlement also known as the city of Chan Chan "capital of the ancient Kingdom of Chimor". Chan in an ancient Mochica language means the sun and it was built in Pre-Hispanic period in 850 AD to be a home for approximately 30 000 to 60 000 people. It had houses for the royal families, priest and the servants, storage facilities for food, ceramics and colorful feathers for clothings, shrines for making human sacrifices and worshiping gods as well as tombs to bury the most important people of the society. It is 20 km² big and was inhabited until 1470 AD when the Incas conquered it and the people were forced to move to Cuzco, the capital of the Inca empire.

This is the city plan:



These are the storage facilities:







The tourists were allowed to visit two sites. On the first site we saw a fortress with almost 10 meters high walls, palaces, courtyards, gardens and towers. Many of the walls were decorated with clay friezes that represented shellfish, waves and marine birds. There people worshiped the moon and the mythical figures of the ocean. Living between the sea and the desert sea-faring skills were vital to the people - after all it was their only source of food and inspiration for myths and legends. In this site all the paint was eroded by the sun and the heavy el niño rains, in the second site we could see that the rooms were painted in bright red, yellow, green and black. The reason for this was that before being relocated to Cuzco the people buried many of the rooms with sand to protect their culture from the Incas. Thanks to this it was still possible to see the impressive wall paintings of the gods and the warrior dancers in the shrines and golden artifacts in the tombs.