Chan Chan

Friends:

When we look out our windows on the North West side we see some of  the ruins of Chan Chan. It is speculated to have been  the worlds largest adobe city. It covered about 20 square kilometers of ground and was estimated to have about 35,000 citizens. The people fished, farmed, and worshiped the moon. Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimu empire. They built elaborate aqueducts and turned arid land around them into fertile fields of grain, fruits and vegetables. They had an enormous wall around the whole city. The Incas came and studied their methods and then decided to conquer them.  Nothing much changed except that they added the sun to their worship of the moon. 

Much of the area is not developed as an archeological site, and people(we) can wander over it. A few homeless people have moved in to a few places. Much of it looks like big piles of dirt. It is apparent that some of the buildings must have been two and three stories tall. In many random places some of the dirt has been dug away exposing some of the original brick work, which in some places is much finer than I had imagined adobe to be. 

There will probably be another installment on Chan Chan when we have visited the historical site that has been developed for tourism, on the other side of the highway.  That part is run by the government as a museum. 

Since there is almost no rain here, adobe is a durable building material. In our wanderings around  some of the back streets, we have seen a few houses in the poorer neighborhoods made of adobe. Sometimes walls are made of adobe enclosing farm fields. We see walls here and there in Trujillo of adobe. Once you get out of the commercial districts, by a block or two in many places things get a little rough looking. Most of the buildings are of red brick and cement though. 

Love, Peter & Debbie