Category: Peru

This once tranquil fishing hamlet, 12km outside of Trujillo, woke up one morning to find itself a brightly highlighted paragraph on Peru’s Gringo Trail. Managing to retain much of its villagey appeal, Huanchaco has cottoned onto its own popularity and today is happy to dish up a long menu of sleeping and dining options to tourists. Come summertime, legions of local and foreign tourists descend on its lapping shores, and this fast-growing resort town makes a great alternative base for exploring the ruins surrounding Trujillo.

Sharing its name with the brandy produced from white muscat grapes in this region, Pisco is an important port 235km south of Lima. Generally used as a base to see the abundant wildlife of the Islas Ballestas and Península de Paracas, the area is also of historical and archaeological interest, having hosted one of the most highly developed pre-Inca civilizations – the Paracas culture from 900 BC until AD 200, after which the nearby town of Paracas is named. Later it acted as a base for Peru’s revolutionary fever in the 1800s.

Huaraz is the restless capital of this Andean adventure kingdom and its rooftops command exhaustive panoramas of the city’s dominion: one of the most impressive mountain ranges in the world. Nearly wiped out by the earthquake of 1970, Huaraz isn’t going to win any Andean-village beauty contests anytime soon, but it does have personality – and personality goes a long way.

After several hours of crossing the vast emptiness of the Sechura Desert, Piura materializes like a mirage on the horizon, enveloped in quivering waves of heat. It’s hard to ignore the sense of physical isolation forced on you by this unforgiving environment; the self-sufficiency imposed upon early settlers may explain why they identify as Piuran rather than Peruvian. Being so far inland, the scorching summer months will have you honing your radar for air-conditioning as you seek out chilled venues in which to soothe your sweltering skin. But the lovely narrow, cobbled streets and charismatic colonial houses of central Piura make up for the fact that there’s little else for tourists to do here. Its role as a hub for the spokes of the northern towns means that you’ll probably end up spending some time here sighing in the relief of the occasional afternoon breeze.

Rocked by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes nearly every century since the Spanish arrived in 1540, Peru’s second-largest city doesn’t lack for drama. Locals sometimes say ‘When the moon separated from the earth, it forgot to take Arequipa,’ waxing lyrical about the city’s grand colonial buildings, built from an off-white volcanic rock called sillar that dazzles in the sun. As a result, Arequipa has been baptized the White City. Its distinctive stonework graces the stately Plaza de Armas, along with countless beautiful colonial churches, monasteries and mansions scattered throughout the city.

For the uninitiated it is quite a revelation to arrive at Pucallpa (pu-kal-pa), the capital of the department of Ucayali, after miles of lush jungle travel from the raw and rocky Andes. The sight of the sweeping Río Ucayali pushing its way through Amazonian hinterland is impressive. You feel as if you have reached the coast. In fact you can reach the coast – eventually – in Brazil via the Río Ucayali and its major partner the Río Amazonas.

The irresistibly sexy city of Arequipa, known as the White City, is surrounded by some of the wildest terrain in Peru. This is a land of active snowy volcanoes, high-altitude deserts, thermal hot springs, salt lakes and, last but not least, the world’s deepest canyons.