If there is an ecosystem that captures my imagination, it is the cloud forests, or perhaps better called, “the forests of the clouds.” Walking underneath their damp and dark canopy brimming with colorful orchids and bromeliads, you enter an enchanted world, as if at any minute a green dwarf could surprise you from behind a […]
What can be known about Peru’s pre-Incan civilisation?
Recent archaeological discoveries have shed new light on the history of Peru’s Chachapoya people. Until the 1990s most of what we knew about this pre-Columbian culture – referred to as the ‘Warriors of the Clouds’ by the Inca – was based on third-hand stories from unreliable Spanish chroniclers. Even today, the Chachapoya jigsaw has more gaps than pieces. Yet interest and knowledge in the erstwhile civilisation is growing. In 2017, the hilltop Chachapoya ruins of Kuélap were equipped with a cable car and marketed by the Peruvian government as a northern rival to Machu Picchu. Two years later Unesco placed the ‘Chachapoyas sites of the Utcubamba Valley’ on its tentative list of World Heritage Sites being considered for nomination.