Cloud warriors

No, this isn’t a chapter you missed in Lord of the Rings. The Chachapoya culture that inhabited Keulap are often referred to as the Cloud Warriors. The name is well earned as their settlement was discovered in 1843 at almost 10,000 ft on top of a mountain in the north of Peru. And what a fantastic spot to build a city…

The easiest way to visit this high-mountain settlement is by cable car. The cable car system was installed in 2017 and takes visitors on a 20 minute vertiginous climb in and out of clouds. Wind whistles through the vents at the top of the car and rattles the doors, causing me to panic at my boys when they think it would be fun to bounce or stand or rock the car. Why are they the way they are?

While the “Old World” was settling into the Middle Ages, the Chachapoyans were building temples and homes in the sky and farming the steep mountain side. Houses were built in little turrets and topped with a conical thatched roof.

More elaborate homes had beautiful stone work and the center temple had a face carved at the entrance and on the sides (a shaman or god?)

There is a lot of creepy speculation about all the human remains and mass graves that were found in this complex and at nearby sites. Large amounts of human remains are in the main temple in this site – human sacrifice? ritual burials? Historians think that they might have lived with their dead (small structures inside each home were filled with human bones) and believed that their ancestors had rich afterlife and could impact or empower the living.

Enclosing the whole compound was a 66 ft high wall with only 3 narrow entrances. The compound was highly defensible and took the Incans ~100years to finally conquer. The Incan practice of creating forced laborers (slaves, really) of their conquests might have inclined the Chachapoyans to side with the Spanish and aid the eventual overthrow of the Incans.

The whole site is breathtaking… you are above and in the clouds. All you would need is some pan-flute music and you could imagine people milling about, cooking up some guinea pig dinner and looking down the mountain for the kids to come home.