Of the many tours available in the touristic town of Huaraz, this is one of the archaeological ones discovering an ancient civilization. Our tour left from the Plaza de Armas at 9 AM making a stop at Laguna Querococha about 1-hour 15-minutes into the journey. Its a quick 20 minute stop at this scenic lake which lies at almost 4000 meters above sea level. At this altitude, walking can be a little tiring but it’s a great opportunity to take some pictures with the lake and the mountains on the horizon.
As the tour bus continues to Chavin, the guide points out a geographical fault in the mountain which looks like the mountain has been torn apart. It’s then another hour to get to the town of Chavin where the archaeological site is located. Once inside, the guide gives you a history of the pre-Columbian civilization – the Chavin people – who lived there between 1000 BC and 200 BC. This ancient civilization was advanced for its time in architecture, astrology, and mathematics as well as being considered spiritual leaders. Neighboring civilization would travel to Chavin de Huantar for spiritual enlightenment, but only a select few were allowed to enter the sacred temple.
Walking from the entrance to the main plaza, you can see that archaeologists are still excavating the site. A large part of the site has been excavated though; including parts of the main temple. It is truly incredible to see how the Chavin had built their structures to withstand earthquakes and also use hydraulic techniques in underground water channels. No feature in the structures is a coincidence but has rather been precisely calculated for a reason; which the guide elaborates on. The highlight of the visit is going into the temple and wandering through the maze-like corridors. Overall, the visit takes about 1-hour 30-minutes. Make sure you put on sunblock and take a hat as a large part of the visit is outdoors.
Following the site visit, the guide takes you to a tourist restaurant in the town. I’ve never been a fan of tourist restaurants, so we let the guide know that we were going to go for a walk around town instead. In the town square, there are a couple of other restaurants with more traditional and cheaper options. We were given an hour for lunch which was enough to walk around and have a meal. The next and final stop is the archaeological museum for the site which is in the town itself. It’s a new and modern building and home to many of the artifacts found on the site. The information panels also have the English translation with lots of additional information about the site as well as the Chavin people. The museum is fairly small and the guide took us around in about 30 minutes. We finished with the museum visit around 3 PM and then got back on the bus. This was the end of the tour and the bus took us back to Huaraz arriving at around 5 PM.
