The Luxury Peru Travel Company

In the morning we tour the historic center of Trujillo, a city whose heart still pulses with colonial splendor.  We visit the immense main square and the spacious mansions built by Spanish and Creole gentry during the 17th and 18th centuries.

 

Then we make our way through Trujillo towards the coast, arriving at the great Chimú center of Chan Chan, the largest adobe city ever built.  It was in fact an elite settlement, a series of nine enormous palaces belonging to successive rulers of the Chimú realm.  At its height the population here may have reached 50,000 people. Many of them were artists and craftspeople, who made the sumptuous goldwork, textiles and pottery for which the Chimú were famous.  At the Tschudi palace enclosure we enter a labyrinthine series of courtyards lined with clay friezes of fish and ocean birds, and walled in places with an open meshwork adobe building style believed to represent fishing nets. We visit inner patios, residences, administrative buildings, temples, platforms and storehouses, and a huge reservoir where "sunken gardens" may have produced specialized crops for the Chimu nobility.

 

We continue on to the nearby beach resort of Huanchaco, where we have a chance to try the superb seafood of Trujillo at a restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  Here fishermen still paddle out to sea, kneeling on caballitos de totora -- little one-man reed rafts which have been used for millennia to collect the abundant bounty of the Pacific ocean.

In the afternoon we drive to the airport in time for our flight to Lima.  Because you are flying to Cusco tomorrow morning overnight at the Lima Ramada Airport Hotel.