Chan Chan

Listen to the wind first. It comes off the Pacific, only a short distance to the west, and it carries a fine salty grit that settles on your lips. Under your feet the ground is pale and dusty, the colour of dry sand. Around you, walls of sun-dried mud rise higher than a house. They lean slightly inward, softened at the top by centuries of weather. This is Chan Chan, and almost everything you can see was made from earth, water, and human hands.

Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú, a kingdom that ruled much of Peru's northern coast before the Inca arrived. The Chimú called their realm Chimor. Their city grew here in the Moche Valley over several centuries, roughly from the tenth century to the late fifteenth century. At its height it covered around twenty square kilometres. Scholars generally describe it as the largest city built of adobe in the Americas before the Spanish arrived. Adobe is simply mud mixed with straw or sand, shaped into bricks and dried in the sun.

Here is the first surprise. This coast is one of the driest places on Earth. Rain can fail for years at a time. Mud architecture only survives in a place like this, where water rarely falls from the sky. The Chimú used that dryness well. But they also needed water to live, so they dug canals from the rivers and channelled them across the desert. Fields of maize, beans, and cotton once spread green around these walls.

The city is not one single block. It is a cluster of large walled compounds, often called ciudadelas, or citadels. Archaeologists count about ten of them. Each one is a rectangle surrounded by massive walls, with only a narrow entrance. Many researchers believe each citadel belonged to a ruler. When a king died, his compound became his tomb and a place of memory, and the next king built a new one. The city grew, in a sense, one reign at a time.

The compound most visitors walk through today is known as Tschudi, named after a Swiss explorer of the nineteenth century. Its older local name is Nik An. Parts of it have been carefully restored, so you can follow a marked path through courtyards, corridors, and ceremonial spaces. As you walk, notice how the passages turn and narrow. They were not designed for easy movement. They were designed to control who went where, and who saw whom.

Now look closely at the walls themselves. Many of them are covered in relief friezes, patterns pressed and carved into the clay. You will see rows of fish, all swimming in the same direction. You will see seabirds, often identified as pelicans. You will see wave shapes, and a lattice pattern that looks very much like a fishing net. This is the second surprise. The kings of a desert city chose the ocean as their main decoration.

That choice makes sense when you remember where you are standing. The Chimú were farmers, but they were also fishermen. The sea gave them anchovies, shellfish, and seabirds. Not far from here, in the beach town of Huanchaco, fishermen still ride the waves on small reed boats called caballitos de totora. The name means little reed horses. It is a living link to the coastal traditions that this city's people knew.

Inside the citadel, look for small U-shaped rooms. Archaeologists call them audiencias. They usually sit at key points along the corridors, near storerooms. Many researchers think officials sat in them to oversee goods moving in and out. Behind the audiencias stand rows of storerooms. This was an economy of cloth, metal, food, and labour, all controlled from behind these high walls. The ordinary people of Chan Chan mostly lived outside them, in smaller homes of cane and mud.

Keep walking and you may reach a large sunken rectangle, a kind of walk-in well. It is called a huachaque. The Chimú dug it down until it reached groundwater, so the compound had its own water supply in the middle of the desert. Sometimes reeds still grow in it. Standing at its edge, you can imagine the green colour and the cool air this gave to a hot, dusty court.

There is also a legend about where the Chimú dynasty began. According to a story recorded after the Spanish conquest, a founder named Taycanamo arrived from the sea on a raft. He is said to have settled in this valley and started the royal line. Nobody can prove this tale. But it fits the friezes around you, where the ocean appears again and again, as a source of food, power, and perhaps origin.

The Chimú did not last forever. In the later fifteenth century, the expanding Inca Empire conquered them. Many accounts say the Inca carried skilled Chimú metalworkers to their capital, Cusco, because their gold and silver work was so admired. Later, after the Spanish arrived, treasure hunters dug into the burial platforms here searching for precious metals. Many of the deep holes and broken mounds you see across the site are the scars of that looting.

Today the greatest threat comes from the weather. Every few years, the climate pattern called El Niño can bring heavy rain to this dry coast. Rain is dangerous for walls made of mud. It softens them, washes away the friezes, and brings up salts from the ground. Chan Chan was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, and in the same year it was placed on the list of World Heritage in Danger. Conservation work continues, and you will notice protective roofs over some fragile walls.

Before you leave, stop for a moment in one of the open courtyards. Look up at the line where the mud wall meets the pale coastal sky. Feel the wind again, and taste the salt. Somewhere beyond these walls the Pacific is breaking on the shore, as it did for the people who built all of this by hand. As you walk back toward the entrance, watch the fish and the birds on the walls... still swimming, still flying, in their long rows of clay.