Things to do
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Cañón del Sonche
A gorge some nine hundred metres deep cut by the Sonche behind the village of Huancas, with a railed platform built out over the drop. The cloud usually lifts by the middle of the morning, and condors are seen working the far wall.
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Catarata Gocta
A two stage waterfall of 771 metres falling off the cloud forest escarpment, unreported outside its own valley until a German survey brought it to notice in 2005. Paths from Cocachimba and San Pablo reach the lower and upper falls, each a walk of about two hours.
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Cocachimba
The village on the south side of the Gocta valley, and the usual start for the walk in to the foot of the falls. Its viewpoint looks straight down the length of the drop, which is the picture most people arrive having already seen.
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Huancas
A pottery village on the plateau above Chachapoyas where the women still build cooking vessels by hand without a wheel. It is the road head for the Sonche viewpoints and for the Huanca Urco platform, and the walk between the two takes about an hour.
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Kuélap
A walled citadel of the Chachapoya people at 3,000 metres above the Utcubamba, its perimeter running twenty metres high and enclosing more than four hundred round stone houses. Entry is through three passages that narrow to single file, which is what most visitors remember of it.
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Mausoleos de Revash
A cluster of small gabled tombs built into a limestone cliff and painted red and cream, reading from the path opposite like a row of miniature houses. They held collective burials, and the pigment on the rock around them survives at close to its original strength.
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Museo de Leimebamba
The museum built to hold the more than two hundred mummies recovered from the cliff tombs at Laguna de los Cóndores in 1997, kept in a climate controlled room seen through glass. The textiles and quipus found with them make up the rest of the collection.
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Sarcófagos de Karajía
Six clay sarcophagi standing more than two metres tall on a ledge in a cliff face above the Utcubamba, each holding a mummy and topped with a modelled human head. They are seen from below across a small gorge, since the ledge itself has never been reachable.
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Yalape
A Chachapoya settlement of terraced platforms and round houses spread over several hectares in the hills above Levanto, its walls carved with the zigzag and rhombus friezes the culture used. It is barely visited, and it is reached on a path rather than a road.