Most visitors to Peru make a beeline for the altitudes of Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley in the south to behold the Incas’ feats of engineering. But here, in the northern region of Amazonas, the climate is more tropical than Andean, and the most famous former inhabitants are the Chachapoya, whom the Incas eventually pushed aside. My partner, Henry, is Peruvian, and over the past decade we’ve visited his home country many times to take in its headlining attractions—trekking to Machu Picchu, floating along the Amazon, diving into bowls of ceviche in Lima. But until now, all I knew of this corner of the country was the rumors of still-untouched archaeological sites lost amid feral jungle.
For my first solo trip to Peru, I wanted to explore new terrain. Like many Peruvians, Marisol Mosquera, the founder of Aracari Travel, is eager to show travelers that there’s more to the country than Machu Picchu, so I turned to her team for help in orchestrating a 10-day adventure through Peru’s lesser-known hits: exploring the ancient ruins of Amazonas before zipping down to Puno and Arequipa, where Andean traditions meet Spanish architecture against a backdrop of volcanic landscapes. Mosquera decided the north was a natural place for me to start. Amazonas’s riches are like its landscape before daybreak—shrouded in mystery and only slowly being revealed.
“This area might be one of the richest archaeologically in Peru,” says Rob Dover, the first guide Aracari pairs me with. We’re approaching the deserted site of Cambolín, near the city of Chachapoyas, on a mountaintop carpeted in wildflowers. Here the remnants of a settlement dating back 500 years, with both Chachapoya and Inca footprints, stand against whipping wind; the only other visitors are two grazing mares. In Amazonas, “It’s more unusual to find nothing on top of a mountain than something,” Dover says.
Over the next few days, my eyes become trained in spotting those somethings, with help from a pair of binoculars and an array of experts. On the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Cocachimba to La Jalca, the region’s first Spanish settlement, Dover and I are joined by Peter Lerche, a German-born archaeologist who has spent the better part of his life in Amazonas. He clocks nearly a dozen Inca and pre-Inca structures as we careen along, a wicked smile spreading across his face when he tells me about explorers like Gene Savoy, an American who began coming here in the 1960s in search of El Dorado. Savoy was credited with “discovering” a number of ancient settlements in Peru, including Gran Vilaya, a sprawling area with more than 30 archaeological sites. “It’s easy to say, ‘A new city in Amazonas! A lost city in Amazonas!’ There are ruins everywhere,” Lerche says. “I once started to count, and there were over 250 sites in southern Amazonas.” Some are unmarked, unnamed; others receive so few visitors that nature has begun to reclaim them. The exception is Kuélap, a place so impressive that tour operators and tourism officials hope it will divert visitors from Machu Picchu in the years ahead; it’s been made more accessible by a high-altitude cable car that opened in 2017. But visiting many of these sites requires having a seasoned guide who knows where to look—and can offer an informed guess as to what, exactly, you’re looking at.
