Plodding around Pachacamac

Friday, September 12, 2014
Pachacamac, Lima, Peru

  Today we took a tour to Pachacamac which is the closest major archaeological site to Lima, about 45 minutes away from here. We caught the Mirabus in Parque Kennedy, and I couldn't resist messing with the cats while we waited. I loved this one sleeping in the crotch of the tree. The park makes me laugh. It looks like someone came with a truckload of dead cats and just tossed them everywhere. Except the cats aren't dead, they are sleeping wherever they please without a care in the world.

 Pachacamac is an extensive archaeological complex of palaces and temple-pyramids. It was an important Inca site and a major city when the Spanish arrived, but it had also been a ceremonial center on the central coast about 1000 years before the Inca empire. It was begun in AD 200 and expanded by the Wari culture before being conquered and expanded again by the Incas. Each palace and temple is therefore the work of a different culture. Pachacamac was the Wari god which means "He Who Created Land and TIme".
 
 

Though most of the buildings are now little more than walls of piled rubble around the area, the main temples and huge pyramids have been excavated, with their ramps and stepped sides revealed. You can climb the stairs to the top of the Templo del Sol (though we viewed most of the site from the bus so weren't able to climb). 
 

And there is an Inca complex that has been completely excavated and rebuilt - Palacio de las Mamacuna (House of the Chosen Women) - where girls were taught by older women to serve the priests and the gods, and for some to prepare themselves for the honor of being a virgin sacrifice. It was a great honor for a girl to be chosen - probably great honor for her father and brothers but one wonders how the girl actually felt about it!




After Pachacamac, we went to a restaurant for lunch, saw some folk dancing and saw a Peruvian Paso horse dance. Paso horses' gaits are similar to Tennessee Walking Horses, except the Peruvian horses are born knowing how to do that gait, they don't have to be trained to do it, thus sparing them from some of the barbaric ways that Tennessee horses are trained.
 
 

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