Peru - Lonely Planet Publications [289]
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La Casa Suiza (46-1285; www.casasuiza.com; Los Pinos 451/310; r per person from S20; ) Under new ownership and with plenty of fresh paint to show for it, the Swiss House’s spacious rooms have Peru-themed, airbrushed murals, and good mattresses for your sleeping pleasure. The little cafe downstairs prepares crunchy crust pizzas, and the patio upstairs hosts a nice view and the occasional barbecue. Good-quality bikes are also available for rent (per half-day S15). French American owner Philippe Faucon and staff offer a friendly welcome.
Huanchaco’s Garden (46-1194; huanchacosgarden@yahoo.es; Av Circumvalación 440; s/d S40/60; ) Back from the beach, the clinically clean rooms here are in low white adobe buildings surrounding the promised shady garden. There are a couple of small swimming pools and lots of grass in the walled-in compound. The friendly family that runs the place will try their best to make your stay enjoyable.
Huanchaco Hostal (46-1688; Plaza de Armas; s/d/tr S50/70/95; ) This neat red building looks cute enough to have housed the three little pigs in a past life. On the town’s small Plaza de Armas, this little place has Spartan white rooms and a handsome backyard concealing a secluded pool and garden. There’s plenty of arty touches to make it feel homey.
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Sicán
The Sicán were probably descendants of the Moche and flourished in the same region from about AD 750 to 1375. Avid agriculturalists, the Sicán were also infatuated with metallurgy and all that glitters. The Sicán are known to many archaeologists for their lost-wax (mold-cast) gold ornaments and the manufacture of arsenical copper, which is the closest material to bronze found in pre-Columbian New World archaeology. These great smiths produced alloys of gold, silver and arsenic copper in vast quantities, using little more than hearths fired by algarrobo (carob tree) wood and pipe-blown air to achieve the incredible 1000°C temperatures needed for such work.
Artifacts found at Sicán archaeological sites suggested that this culture loved to shop, or at least trade. They were actively engaged in long-distance trade with peoples along the length and breadth of the continent, acquiring shells and snails from Ecuador, emeralds and diamonds from Colombia, bluestone from Chile, and gold from the Peruvian highlands.
With a structured and religiously controlled social organization, the Sicán engaged in bizarre and elaborate funerary practices, examples of which can be seen at the Museo Nacional Sicán in Ferreñafe (Click here).
Unfortunately, as was the case with many pre-Inca societies, the weather was the ultimate undoing of the Sicán. Originally building their main city at Batán Grande (Click here), northeast of Trujillo, they were forced to move to Túcume (Click here) when El Niño rains devastated that area in the 13th century.
Chimú
The Chimú were contemporaries of the Sicán and lasted from about AD 850 to 1470. They were responsible for the huge capital at Chan Chan (Click here), just north of Trujillo. The artwork of the Chimú was less exciting than that of the Moche, tending more to functional mass production than artistic achievement. Gone, for the most part, was the technique of painting pots. Instead, they were fired by a simpler method than that used by the Moche, producing the typical blackware seen in many Chimú pottery collections. While the quality of the ceramics declined, skills in metallurgy developed, with gold and various alloys being worked.
The Chimú are best remembered as an urban society. Their huge capital contained about 10,000 dwellings of varying quality and importance. Buildings were decorated with friezes, the designs molded into mud walls and important areas were layered with precious metals. There were storage bins for food and other products from across the empire, which stretched along the coast from Chancay to the Gulf of Guayaquil (southern Ecuador). There were huge walk-in wells, canals, workshops and temples. The royal dead were buried in