Trujillo

Trujillo is the city most travellers skip on their way between Lima and the Ecuadorian border, and that omission is its quiet advantage. It is a proper colonial city — a Plaza de Armas ringed by mansions painted in confident pastels, wrought-iron window grilles, churches with the slightly excessive gold of the Peruvian baroque — but it wears all of this without the polish of a place that expects tourists. We arrived on an overnight bus, bleary, and walked into a plaza where schoolchildren in uniform were cutting across the square and a man was selling emoliente from a steaming cart, and nobody paid us the slightest attention, which after the gauntlet of Cusco felt like a small mercy.

Chan Chan and the adobe kingdoms

What makes the city extraordinary is what surrounds it. A short ride out, on the desert plain between the city and the sea, lies Chan Chan — the largest adobe city ever built, the capital of the Chimú kingdom that the Inca only conquered shortly before the Spanish arrived. Walking into the restored Tschudi complex is disorienting: corridors of mud-brick walls pressed with reliefs of fish and seabirds and squared-off waves, all of it the colour of the desert it came from, all of it slowly melting back into that desert every time the rare rain falls. A guide explained that the entire kingdom ran on these motifs of the sea, and standing in a ceremonial courtyard with pelicans wheeling overhead it was easy to see why — the ocean was their entire economy and cosmology at once.

Nearer the city stand the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna, two enormous Moche pyramids older still than Chan Chan, where archaeologists have peeled back layers to reveal painted friezes of a fanged deity repeated down the walls in colours that have no business surviving a thousand years in the open. I am not usually moved by ruins; I find a lot of them are piles of stones that require an act of imagination I cannot always summon. These required no imagination at all.

Huanchaco and the reed horses

In the late afternoon we took a colectivo out to Huanchaco, the fishing village that doubles as Trujillo’s beach. Here, men still go out through the surf on caballitos de totora — narrow boats woven from reeds, ridden astride like a horse, a design that has not meaningfully changed in something like three thousand years. They stand the boats up to dry along the seafront in long rows, pointed at the sky, and the sight of them next to the surfers and the ceviche shacks is the whole north coast in one image: the very old and the merely present, sharing a beach without comment.

We ate ceviche at a plastic table facing the water — corvina cured so fresh it was almost sweet, with the violent red of the local ají and a heap of toasted corn — while the light went amber over the Pacific. That meal, more than any ruin, is why I would tell anyone to break the journey here.

When to go

The coast here is desert, so it rarely rains, but it has its own grey overcast season — the garúa — that smothers the city in flat cloud from roughly June to October. For sun and clear sightlines over the ruins, come between November and April. The water at Huanchaco is cold year-round thanks to the Humboldt current; the surfers wear wetsuits, and so should you if you go in.