A general view of the Valley of the Pyramids
On the afternoon of Boxing Day, my guide and driver took me to Túcume, also known as the Valley of the Pyramids. In fact, they’re not really pyramids at all, but large mud-brick platforms, some used for ritual purposes (e.g. temples) and others apparently being administrative complexes. It’s mostly unexcavated as yet, but there have been some small-scale digs and you can see in the picture above some temporary shelters, designed to protect the exposed archaeology from the elements – being mud brick, it’s all very easily eroded. We walked up to a vantage point and once you got your eye in it was possible to see man-made platforms all over the valley floor. There are about 26 of them, covering an area of over 500 acres, and dating from AD800 to the Spanish conquest in AD1532.
Two of the mud-brick "pyramids" at Túcume
Although there hasn’t been much excavation to date, some very interesting structures have been uncovered, which give a feeling for how the temples would originally have looked.
An adobe temple, showing some original bas-relief decoration
To the left of centre, you can see a ceremonial square. The walls are covered with bas-relief decoration – it looked mostly like highly stylised birds, fish and waves. Imagine those brightly painted in red, yellow, blue, black and white – and then replicate that across the valley floor – it would have been very gaudy indeed to our eyes.
This site was slightly busier than Pampa Grande the previous day, in that I wasn’t the sole visitor there. But there were only a very few tourists, mostly Peruvian, wandering around. It felt a real priviledge to have such a glorious site almost entirely to myself!
