Huaca del Sol
The Temple of the Moon was on one side of a valley. On the valley floor were the remains of houses of the original inhabitants, and on the other side was the Temple of the Sun. Despite its name, given to it by the Spanish, it’s probably not a temple at all but more likely a political and administrative centre for the Moche city – like a city hall I suppose. And there is no evidence that the sun was particularly worshipped there. It’s the biggest adobe pyramid in the Americas, with over 140 million mud bricks used for its construction. Each family in the Moche empire would have to produce a certain number of mud-bricks each year as a tax or tithe, and that’s how they were able to amass the building materials for such massive structures. It’s not been excavated very much, but has been looted almost continuously since the Conquistadors first found it – in 1602 the Spanish even diverted the river to wash away much of the structure in search of buried gold!
It’s difficult to get the scale of the structure from the photo – as usual, there was hardly anyone else at the site so I couldn’t get a person in shot to give a sense of scale. According to the guide book I bought at the rather good little souvenir shop, the adobe pyramid would originally have been 345m long, 160m wide and 30m high.
There was a poster up in the ticket office, showing the number and nationality of visitors to the site. Since I visited right at the end of 2012 the figures were nearly a year out of date, but I still found them very interesting. In 2011, a grand total of 1500 British tourists visited Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna – that’s about 4 per day. We were the sixth most populous group, behind the Peruvians (way out in front) with over 100,000 visitors, then the USA, Germany, France, and “other”. In total though, the site only got an average of 330 visitors per day in all of 2011 – ridiculously small (in my opinion) for such an impressive set of ruins. There was probably fewer than a dozen visitors in the whole complex when I was there.
