Amazonas

Kuelap stands on a limestone ridge roughly a kilometre above the valley floor, wrapped in a stone wall that reaches close to twenty metres at its highest and encloses several hundred buildings. Almost every one of them is round. That single fact is the most useful thing a visitor can carry up the hill, because Inca building is rectilinear and this is not Inca work: the Chachapoya built here from around the sixth century and held the ridge for something like a thousand years before the Inca took the region, only a few decades ahead of the Spanish. The entrances are the other detail worth noticing — long stone passages that narrow until they admit one person at a time, which tells you what the wall was for. A cable car from the valley replaced a long climb and transformed how the site is reached, but access has been interrupted more than once by structural work on the walls themselves, so this is a place to confirm current arrangements before building a trip around it rather than after.

Gocta drops in two great stages down a cloud-forest wall and ranks among the tallest waterfalls measured anywhere, though the rankings depend on what you count as one fall. It is often described as having been discovered in the mid-2000s, which is worth correcting: the people living beneath it had always known it and had a name for it. What happened was a survey, a measurement and international publicity — the fall was new to maps, not to anyone who lived there. The walk begins at one of two villages on either side of the valley and takes something over two hours each way through farmland and then forest, with horses available for the uphill return. The path is mud rather than rock for much of its length, and the reward at the base is the standard one for very tall falls: enough spray that you will not stay dry and cannot easily photograph it.

The Chachapoya put their dead in places that are almost impossible to reach, and two sites show the two different ways they did it. At Karajía, a row of clay figures stands on a ledge partway up a rock face — human-shaped, roughly two and a half metres tall, with modelled faces and, on some, a human skull set on top. They are viewed from the path below, which is the only way to see them and entirely sufficient. Revash is the other form: small structures built into a recess in a cliff, painted red and cream, with pitched roofs and openings that make them read as a row of little houses rather than as tombs. Both were placed to be seen from the valley and unreachable from it, and both are approached on foot from a road that requires the walk.

At the southern end of the valley, the village of Leymebamba holds a museum built for one specific purpose. In the 1990s a burial site at a remote lake high above the village was found and looted, and what survived was recovered and brought down — several hundred mummified bodies together with the textiles, gourds and record-keeping cords buried with them. The museum was built by the community to hold them, and it is the single best place in the region to understand who built Kuelap, because it is the only place where the people themselves are present rather than only their architecture. It is a modest building in a small village, it is not on the way to anything, and it is the most affecting stop in Amazonas.

Chachapoyas is a quiet colonial town of low whitewashed buildings around a plaza, sitting well above the river at an altitude that catches people arriving from the lowlands. It is a base rather than a destination: agencies, places to sleep and eat, and the junction from which every excursion in the region starts. The valley itself is the connecting thread — a single road running north and south along the Utcubamba, with the sites hung off it at intervals, so days here have a shape of driving out, walking, and driving back. Distances look short on a map and take much longer than the map suggests, which is the standard error visitors make when planning this region.

There are three ways in and none of them is quick. The nearest airport is at Jaén to the west, which cuts the overland portion to roughly half a day; the coastal approach from Chiclayo is a long day's drive climbing from sea level; and the eastern approach runs up from Tarapoto, which is the usual pairing for anyone combining this region with the high jungle. Whichever you choose, plan the altitude rather than discovering it: Chachapoyas sits well above two thousand metres and Kuelap approaches three thousand, so arriving from Tarapoto or the coast means going from near sea level to real elevation in a single day. It is not Cusco, but it is enough to make the first afternoon uncomfortable if you walk straight up a hill on it.