Dirtbiking on the Temple of the Sea Goddess

At the northern boundary of Miraflores, one of Lima's oceanfront neighborhoods, is the Huaca Pucllana. It is a pre-Inca temple of the Lima culture. "Huaca" = temple & "Pucllana" = play. Not sure what this is the "Temple of Play", certainly was not fun and games for the women sacrificed to the main deity, the sea goddess.

The temple rises as a huge adobe mound in the middle of the bustling city. We arrived just in time for a tour, which included a living garden of their agriculture (beans, squash, cotton, etc) and pens of important animals. Here Carter is shown with the cuy, the guinea pig. In the tour guide's words: "We find it weird that you guys look at them and think 'pet'. I look at them and think 'lunch'.

30 years ago, this was all just an anonymous dusty hill used for dirt biking. Since then, Peruvians have been sweeping away the dirt and have revealed half the temple. This is not a hollow structure, it is 7 solid platforms formed by stacking adobe bricks like books and smearing a layer of mud on top, then doing it again. Every 50 years or so, the Lima people would decide to sacrifice a girl and start construction of a new level. It would have been smooth, and it's bright yellow paint is still visible in a few spots.

The tour took us up 5 levels, where various kinds of offerings were made to ancestors in the name of the Sea Goddess, or her son, the Shark. Eventually, the Huari conquered the Lima, and created several dozens of tombs (including Lima children sacrificed to be servants in the afterlife). Almost all of these were intentionally desecrated by vengeful locals when the Huari eventually withdrew.

The tour was interesting and we were pleased to afterwards enjoy a nice lunch at a thriving trattoria across the street. It's a little disappointing that our house will be in an area that is relatively uninteresting...this area of Miraflores and San Isidro seemed really cool in an earnest, cafe-on-the-corner kind of way. But the Peace Corps HQ is an hour away in commuter traffic, and the embassy only allows certain neighborhoods anyway.