Kuélap

Kuélap rides the crest of a limestone ridge at about 3,000 metres above the Utcubamba valley in the cloud-forest country of northern Peru. It was built by the Chachapoya, a people who lived in these steep, wet Andean valleys long before the Inca reached them. People were already living on the ridge in the fifth century, but most of what stands today was raised between about 900 and 1100. The result is a walled settlement nearly 600 metres long and up to 110 metres wide, wrapped in a wall of finely dressed limestone blocks that rises 10 to 20 metres high in places, so that from the valley it reads less like a town than like a great stone ship moored on the mountain.

The walls are the first marvel, and the way into them the second. Kuélap has three entrances, and the main one is a deep, tapering passage between high walls that narrows until only one person can pass at a time, a design that made the interior easy to defend and gives arriving visitors a sense of being funnelled into another world. Inside, on raised platforms, lie the remains of more than four hundred buildings, and almost all of them are round, a striking contrast with the rectangular architecture of the Inca. Many of the circular houses are banded with friezes in rhomboid and zigzag patterns, set under projecting stone cornices that once kept off the rain. Among the buildings stands El Tintero, "the inkwell", a 5.5-metre structure shaped like an inverted cone, whose purpose is still debated.

The settlement may have held around three thousand people. It was abandoned around 1570, in the decades after the Spanish conquest, and the forest gradually reclaimed it. In 1843 a judge from Chachapoyas, Juan Crisóstomo Nieto, came upon the ruins by chance, and they have been studied ever since. Today bromeliads and mosses grow from the old walls, trees rise between the round houses, and on clear days the ridge looks out over a sea of mountains and cloud, which makes the scale of what the Chachapoya built here all the more striking.

Getting there

Kuélap is about 22 kilometres in a straight line from Chachapoyas, the regional capital, which has a small airport (CHH) about 25 kilometres from the site. Most visitors travel by road from Chachapoyas to Nuevo Tingo in the Utcubamba valley, where a short shuttle leads to the lower station of the cable car, opened in 2017. The gondolas climb about 4 kilometres up the mountainside in around a quarter of an hour, leaving visitors within about 2 kilometres of the fortress; the rest is a walk along the ridge.