I blame Google Earth

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The main reason why I came to Trujillo was because I saw the Temple of the Sun and Temple of the Moon
in Google Earth. And then there was the recommendation in my guidebook that its worth stopping and the fact that it nicely breaks a otherwise 16 hour bus ride neatly in two halves.

Trujillo has a third important archaeological site called Chan Chan which is the largest Pre-Columbian city in South America. The whole city covered one an area of over 20 sq. km and it is estimated that over 30.000 people lived in the city. The whole city was completely built out of mud or mud bricks. The city was covered by sand dunes over the centuries which protected the mud walls. The problem started when the sand dunes were removed and rain pounded the now exposed walls. It was even worse through the heavy rains El Niño brings from time to time. There are various attempts to keep the walls intact which range from building roofs over important parts, putting a special liquid plastic coating over and inside the walls to covering the walls with sand again.
Chan Chan has one main temple that is open to the public and this temple is size wise quite impressive. There are also some carvings to see but mostly its mud walls.

The Temple of the Sun is not open to the public but it has the claim to fame to be composed of over 100 million adobe bricks and was the largest pre-Columbian adobe structure built in the Americas.

The Temple of the Moon is open and can be visited which I did.

From outside both temples look as Sipan like a pile of mud. The main feature of the Temple of the Moon are the murals. The temple was extended quite a few times and every time they made the temple bigger they just build over the exiting paintings and murals. Hence when you dig deeper into the temple you find older and older original pictures and murals in a supreme condition. A lot of them have still the original paint on them and look like they have been finished yesterday.

The people who used the Temple were also into human sacrifices. Around 150 bodies with cut marks to bones and the vertebrae have been found in various locations on top of the pyramid

Next stop Lima

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Photos

Mud walls
The pattern apparently symbolizes the fishing nets the locals used

Chan Chan
The walls were up to 12 meters high built of solid mud. The foundation was a layer of stones to make the whole structure more earthquake safe. Seems to have worked

Our tour bus
The lady in the middle was the tour leader. Not sure who was older the car or her :)

Temple of the Moon
As I said it looks like a pile of dried mud. The mud brick used to build the pyramid were all marked to distinguish who made them

Murals inside the Temple of the Moon
The colours are still very vivid. This section was bricked over when the temple was extended

Temple of the Sun and other archaeological sites
The temple of the Sun was build using 100 million mud bricks which made it the largest Pre-Colombian structure in South America

Pinting inside the temple of the Moon
Two sides of the Temple were covered in paintings. The other two were just painted in red. The side with the nice paintings was on the side that didn’t erode that fast