Views from around Lima's main square

Lima's Plaza de Armas or, as it is officially known today, Plaza Mayor, is Lima's main square. It was there that the Spanish city of Lima was founded in 1535, on the site of an existing native settlement.

The square is surrounded by the Cathedral, the Presidential Palace, and City Hall. Many visitors mistakenly think that the buildings are colonial, but the only colonial architectural elements still surviving there are the art cast iron fountain, inaugurated in 1651, and the Royal Magistrate's House, also from the 1600s. Over time earthquakes, fires, and "progress" have led to the reconstruction or replacement of the rest.

The plaza and the surrounding boulevards are usually crowded with tourists, local visitors, taxis, and hawkers.  The reason I was able to capture images relatively devoid of crowds was that on the day I went in late July the plaza was closed to visitors.

Public school teachers from the Cusco region had gone on strike for better wages and better conditions, and had journeyed to Lima to press their case. There, there were joined by local teachers, and were staging rallies and marches a few blocks away, near Congress.  The government had decided to close off the plaza to avoid any disturbances or scenes in the vicinity of the Presidential Palace and to "protect the historic center".

Of course, I did not know that when I ventured downtown and found myself cut off from the bookstore I wished to visit.  After being rebuffed at one intersection, I found a spot where the police were letting a few people in. They shut access just as I was about to go in, and asked us to wait a bit. People got verbally belligerent, and the officer in charge --feeling stung after his earlier gesture-- now insisted that access was definitely closed unless one had an ID showing that one lived or worked in the area.  Fortunately, someone called to him that she had some foreign visitors who had "come all this way to know the historic center", so he instructed her to go in at the far end of the barricade.  Hearing that, I quickly followed, and when challenged, I told the officer there that "he said for tourists to come in this way" and handed him my California driver's license.  The cop glanced at it and waved me through.

Thus, I got to stroll around the periphery of the nearly deserted plaza, emptier that I've ever seen it, and on a serendipitously sunny day.

Lima city hall (built in 1944).

Art cast iron fountain (from1651), and the Presidential Palace (1938).

From L to R: Presidential Palace, Mt. San Cristobal, Royal Magistrate's House (17th C.), Archbishop's Palace (1924).

Lima Cathedral, viewed across the Plaza, from Pasaje Santa Rosa.

In the foreground, the monument to Taulichusco the Elder, last indigenous ruler of Lima.

Old Post Post Office & Telegraphs building

Pachacamac

This morning Wily, Helba, my dad, and I headed off to Lurin for lunch and to visit the new museum at Pachacamac.

Pachacamac is a 1400 acre archaeological site 40 km south of Lima at the edge of the Lurin Valley. It was first settled in about AD 200, and was one of ancient Peru's primary religious piligrimage sites for over a thousand years, until the Spanish Conquest.

 The main idol of the temple of Pachacamac

The site was dedicated to the earth-creator god, Pachakamaq, who was worshipped far and wide across ancient Peru, and by many successive cultures, including the Ychma, Lima, Wari, and eventually, even, the Incas. 

The remains of the Palace of Taurichumpi, last Inca administrator of Pachacamac

Reconstructed Inca-period structures which housed the "chosen women"

The site museum is pretty much brand-new, having been opened earlier this year and it is a big improvement over the rather small and wear-worn one that had been there previously.

The new museum does not have a great many objects on display, but those it does have are very nice pieces and are arranged and selected to give a very good impression of the cultures who occupied Pachacamac and of the special nature of the site for them.

All in all, it was a great visit.

Inca-period footwear

Inca feathered headdress

Wari-period ceramic "gourd" offering

Grave covering, with spndylus shells brought from Ecuador

Spndylus and cotton necklace, and silver miniature offerings

Inca-period, male and female gold figurines

Tarata Street

Strolling through Miraflores last week, Liz and I stumbled across Tarata Street, which I had known about but had never visited.

Before 1992, Tarata was just a quiet Miraflores side street -much as it is today- but on the night of July 16, 1992 - 23 years ago today, in fact- a powerful Shining Path car bomb exploded there.

There were one or two reports at the time (which I cannot find now) that indicated that the carbomb was actually intended for the banks on the main avenue a block away, but the car collided with a pickup truck at the intersection where the monument now stands and was abandoned minutes before it exploded.  

Those reports were buried or swept aside by the horrendous toll: 183 homes, 400 businesses, and 63 automobiles were either damaged or destroyed, and 25 people were killed and another 155 wounded that night.

People connected with the Shining Path have a t various points corroborated those initial reports that the bomb was not targeted at the civilian population, that it was intended for the banks, that it was a mistake, that the charge was too large.  However, it is hard to see how that one short block would have made any difference given the size of the charge used.  The shockwave would have still travelled down the canyon formed by Tarata's buildings and blown in very window, showering residents with flying shards of glass and other debris.  Either way, it is of little comfort to those who were hurt or lost loved ones.

Lima Zoo - Parque de las Leyendas

Yesterday Liz and I ventured to the Parque de las Leyendas -the "Park of Legends"- which is, in fact, the Lima zoo.

Built in 1964, the zoo was designed to showcase the fauna of Peru's three major natural regions: coast,  highlands, and jungle.  Of the three, the jungle section was, and still is, the centerpiece of the zoo.  Densly planted, it was designed to give visitors the impression of being in a jungle, and included a replica native village on an island.

Naturally, since I was a child it has been my favourite part of the zoo.

Red-bellied piranha ( Pygocentrus nattereri)

Male Andean cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruvianus), Peru's national bird.

White caiman (Caiman crocodylus).

Coatimundi (Nasua nasua)

Maquisapa or Pruvian spider monkey (Ateles chamek).

Huacari

Taricaya turtles (Podocnemis sp.)

Saki (Pithecia sp.,)

That part of the park has been significantly revamped in recent years, and its overall appearance has improved quite a bit.  We noticed that the animal population is much reduced, indicating that the zoo is not undertaking collecting from the wild to replace animals that have passed away.  In one sense that is a good thing, and is in line with modern zoo practices (which emphasize trading among zoos instead of wild colllection), but it also means that some animals are fated to live solitary lives in their enclosures, which for animals such as monkeys, otters, and capybaras could be quite stressful.  It also means that the zoo has no chance of establishing breeding populations of those animals

 Next to the jungle section, the Sierra or highlands portion of the park is the most developed in terms of giving a sense of place.  In the 1990s they built it up to resemble an Andean village, which is a nice touch.  The old replica mine has been preserved, and a favourite attraction in this section of the park (however, we skipped it this time).

Male Andean condor (Vultur gryphus)

A shot in which all four New World camelids can be appreciated.  From L to R: guanaco (Lama guanicoe),
vicuña (Vicugna vicugna), alpaca (Vicugna pacos), llama (Lama glama), and two more vicuñas.

 Another very distinctive feature of the park is that it emcompasses a significant portion of the ruins of what was once the ceremonial and administrative center of the precolumbian city of Maranga, with archaeological sites that date back 1,000 years or more, and go on up through the Inca occupation of the valley (in fact, most of what is visible today dates from the Inca period).

Huaca Tres Palos

Huaca La Cruz

15th century Ychma/Inca vase with an octopus motif

With ample water, treetops, and food supplies, the Parque de las Leyendas is also prime bird habitat, specially in the jungle section, which is just awash in the sounds of wild birds in the trees and bushes.

The huacas, or ruins, also serve an unexpected function as some of the few remaining habitats for native species of lizards and geckos. In fact, the whole of the park serves that purpose for other small animals including several snake, toad, and frog species.  When the zoo was founded it was surrounded by agricultural lands -someof which still received water via precolumbian canals!- and fallow fields.  As the area around it was urbanized those animals found refuge in the park.  In fact there is one species of llizard that is endemic to the park and to just two or three other huacas in the city.

Of martyrs and popular memory

As we here, in the United States, are now soul searching in the aftermath of the civil unrest and heavy-handed police response in Ferguson, Missouri, I am reminded of an encounter I had recently in Ayacucho and what it revealed to me regarding a set of events that took place in Ayacucho in 1969.

In Huamanga -i.e. the city of Ayacucho-  four students were shot dead by the Sinchis -the police's specialized counterinsurgency battalion- during protests.  In nearby Huanta the toll was higher.

Here is what I wrote about them in my university thesis:

"In January, 1969, the military government had passed Supreme Decree 006 which restricted access to free public education by retroactively instituting a 100 sol  monthly tuition of all students who failed a course the previous year.  Naturally, this measure affected the poor far more than the rich as it was already an economic burden for many families to spare the children long enough for them to attend school, and the very conditions imposed by poverty  made it far more likely that they would fail a course.    Not surprisingly, D.S. 006 proved very unpopular and provoked a four-month-long series of protests in Huamanga and Huanta.   In Huamanga the protests were primarily led by the [Communist Party's local committee] through the Frente de Defensa del Pueblo de Ayacucho (Front for the Defense of the People of Ayacucho, FDPA) and the FER [Revolutionary Student Front].   In Huanta, where the degree of organization was lesser, the protests were more spontaneous and also more violent.   At least 18 people lost their lives and many more were wounded during street battles with police in both cities."

The events are memorialized in a popular song, "Flor de Retama", composed by the late Ricardo Dolorier.   Among the lyrics are the lines

Ay! Come all to see.
By the plaza of Huanta
the Sinchis are coming in.
They're going to kill students,
Huantinos at heart

.

Although the military tried to suppress it, the people's memory persisted and in 1974 the Front for the Defense of the People of Ayacucho placed plaques at the spots where each of the four students were murdered.

When I was in Ayacucho in July, attending a colloquium on the role of women in armed conflict and pacification in Peru from 1961 onward, I met a gentleman who had been a student at the time of the protests and continued to be involved in the local movement for human rights.   

He told me about the plaques, which to my surprise had been completely unknown to me.

One of them had been placed on the front of a building that was then torn down and the plaque lost.  This gentleman had managed to locate it after several years of searching and the owners of the new building were persuaded to allow it to again be placed at the spot.  I neglected to note the location of it [It is at the corner of Jiron Munive and Jiron Madrid, in the San Juan Bautista district (1/3/15)], and of one other, but I did remember that one was located at the end of Jiron Tres Mascaras, near the "new bridge" over the Alameda River, which runs through town The fourth plaque was, to my surprise, one I had walked past without noticing on many occasions when passing through the archway near the market, on Jiron 28 de Julio.

On my last afternoon in Ayacucho, I made a sort pilgrimage to that spot, and for the first time beheld what had been so often bypassed by me: the plaque, placed by the people of Ayacucho, in memory of one whom they regarded as a martyr in their struggle for social justice - young Eulogio Yaranga Saune, killed on that spot on the 21st of June of 1969, while defending the right of the people to a free public education.

Callao and La Punta

Last week (I've been a bit remiss about posting updates, I know) Toya and Orlando took me to Callao, Lima's port district.

Officially, Callao is a province, independent of other jurisdictions, and whose existence has been built into successive national Constitutions for years. In practice, it does depend quite a bit on the metropolitan government of greater Lima (although arguments do arise, as is the case now over reform of the city's transportation system).

Until the middle of the last century Callao was a separate city from Lima, although it has served as the capital's port for hundreds of years.  Long ago, however, its fortunes faded and it acquired a reputation as one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods -which it does, I think deservedly, retain to a degree.

Today, Callao's former glory can still be glimpsed in its crumbling early Republican architecture

All of it, presided over by the Real Felipe fortress, erected to defend the city from pirates and English privateers.  Its construction was begun under Viceroy José Antonio Manso de VelascoViceroy in 1746 and completed in 1774 during the administration of Viceroy Manuel de Amat y Junent.

At the far end of the peninsula that comprises Callao, and the northern end of the bay of Lima, lies La Punta, which -as its name implies- is a point of land extending into the pacific.  On its northern side lies the deepwater anchorages that serve the port, and on the southern side, the bay which is overlooked by the city of Lima.

At La Punta's very end, there is a beach which is still used by artisanal fishermen -many of Italian descent-  who supplement their income by giving boat tours when the weather is good.

Off the coast, lie a set of islands, comprised mainly by the large isles of El Fronton and San Lorenzo.  The latter harbors the last of Lima's sea lion population,  a myriad seabirds, and even Magellanic penguins on its far side.  It has also been found to contain Pre-Columbian ruins and traces left by pirates and English privateers - including gravesites.  

El Fronton (at left), San Lorenzo (at center), and the Naval Academy at La Punta (at right)

Unfortunately, the powers that be have dreams of building a causeway between La Punta and the island and turning it into a deepwater port for larger ships or building an airport on it, either of which would devastate the ecology and archaelogy of the island.

El Fronton, for its part, was infamous as an island prison over which lurid tales were spun.  In the 1980s it was used  to house prisoners from the Shining Path.  The prisoners rebelled on June 18, 1986, and by the next day, courtesy of the Navy, most had been killed and the prison reduced to rubble.  The Navy demolished the cell block even with wounded prisoners inside, precipitating a scandal and crisis for the government of President Alan Garcia.

(From L to R) Orlando, myself, Mr Peñaflor

Of course, being surrounded on three sides by ocean, La Punta is known as a prime locale for quality seafood meals.   And, of course, we took advantage of that, at La Caleta, a restaurant run by Mr. Rodolfo Peñaflor its friendly and talkative owner.

Cebiche

A bowl of parihuela, a Callao classic