Bizarre Culture
Inside Belén's "Witches' Market": Medicine, Pusanga, and Wildlife Trade
Traditional medicine, spiritual products, and documented wildlife trafficking coexist in Pasaje Paquito—but they are not the same thing.
Q'eswachaka: The Mechanics of the Last Inca Grass Bridge
The Q'eswachaka bridge is rebuilt by hand from woven grass every single year—an ancient system of communal labor still functioning in Peru.
Qoyllur Rit'i: Sacred Ice, Ukukus and Peru's Snow Star Pilgrimage
Tens of thousands of pilgrims travel into Peru's high Andes for Qoyllur Rit'i, a pilgrimage where Catholic devotion intersects with older Andean relationships to sacred mountains.
Takanakuy: Peru's Christmas Fights Are Not What They Seem
Takanakuy is not simply a Christmas free-for-all. In parts of Peru's Chumbivilcas province, ritualized fighting serves as one mechanism for confronting grievances publicly, alongside broader festive and musical functions.
Dark History
Capacocha: What the Inca Ice Mummies Reveal About Sacrifice and Empire
Capacocha was a solemn religious sacrifice, but modern archaeology suggests it also had profound political functions, linking local elites, sacred landscapes, and imperial authority across the Inca state.
Huancavelica: The “Mine of Death” Behind Spain's Silver Empire
Explore the history of Santa Bárbara, the mercury mine that supplied Spanish colonial silver production while exposing generations of Andean workers to forced labor, cave-ins, mineral dust, and toxic mercury exposure.
Yungay: The City Erased by the Andes in Three Minutes
On May 31, 1970, an earthquake triggered a rock-and-ice avalanche from Huascarán that reached Yungay in minutes, burying the old town and leaving a memorial landscape still visible today.
Extreme Nature
Shanay-Timpishka: The Science Behind Peru's Boiling River
Journey deep into the Peruvian Amazon to understand one of the world's most unusual documented thermal rivers.
La Rinconada: The Gold-Mining Town at 5,100 Meters
The highest permanent human settlement on Earth is defined by extreme labor systems, mercury contamination, and unique physiological realities.
Dark Tourism
Chauchilla Cemetery: How Grave Robbers Reshaped a Desert Necropolis
Discover why Chauchilla's famous desert mummies are neither an untouched burial scene nor as straightforwardly “Nazca” as popular accounts often suggest.
San Francisco Catacombs: What the Bone Pits Actually Tell Us
Explore Lima's San Francisco Catacombs, an underground colonial burial complex containing the remains of an estimated 25,000 people and some of Peru's most striking ossuary displays.
Sarcophagi of Karajía: The Chachapoyas Cliff Burials
Explore the 15th-century Sarcophagi of Karajía, anthropomorphic Chachapoyas tombs containing mummified individuals on cliffs in northern Peru.