The city that was already walking

In 19th century, Antonio Raimondi already had identified the cause of its glide.

 

By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo. Photographs produced by Arabella Carrasco,distributted by FACTORTIERRA.

 

This place is 132 miles to the east of Piura City (PIU).

 

HUANCABAMBA, Peru – The first time I arrived to this city (6474 feet altitude) was overnight, November 4^th, 1995. When it awoke, I went down to have breakfast at the river’s rim by taking Piura street, that instead going straight down, it turns a steep meander. Beside this way, a Deep stream, that in successive visits, I got to understand that, if it’s followed uphill, connects us to Huascar Street, the parallel one to the north of Piura’s.

On its first block, the cobbles paving the slope are separated in disorder and there was a bump in the terrain’s lowest section. “It’s the fault,” my friend Ciro La Madrid explained me, and it’s the reason why that Andean capital city is named The walking City.  Nothing to do with the local etimology, possibly aymara, that means flat of big rocks.

According to geologists, the central and northern portions of the city, in the left bank of Huancabamba River, are built on a fault that has not left to open. A study by Peru’s Mineral, Geological, and Metallurgical Institute (Ingemet, as in Spanish), published in 2009, points out that side of the river is as steep as it is exposed to constant slides every time it rains at the summit of the range, especially if the terrain is deforested. Take a look about other sightings published by Ingemet in 2009.

Let’s add the tectonic faults creating the big cracks or gullies, like the one beside me on my way I went through that morning in 1995. Curiously, that fact is not known since 2009, or since 2000 when my friend put me on the spot, or maybe since mid-20^th century when Father Justino Ramirez published it in his monograph about Huancabamba Province.

 

150 years ago

The capital city is found built on a plateau of a little steep terrain in the left bank of the river, it’s an average population but badly located, because the floor is sinking  in several points and many houses threaten to fall down.”

The description was published in 1874 by the Italian scientist Antonio Raimondi in the first issue of the book el Perú (Peru). It belongs to the exploration he did don Piura Department once he passed through Cajamarca. That time, Huancabamba Province only had the half of districts it owns today: Huancabamba, Sondor, Sondorillo, and Huarmaca.

Raimondi wrote: “Built Huancabamba Town over a deposit or bank of released land, and with cropped lots located in a a little higher plateau, the water serves for irrigation of croplands, infiltrating through the terrain, has undermined beneath the population, which floor is sinking in many points, also forming deep ditches, so the houses built in those parts lose their level, the walls crack, and although they get repaired, they crack few time later and tend to bring down.”

 

There was a plan

The population of Huancabamba feared the city got damaged at all, it planned to move to a flat located at the other bank, in actual lands of Quispampa Community, that in Raimondi times was called the same. Does the Italian scholar describe what we call El Aterrizaje today?

Currently, what is at the other side is Ramón Castilla Bourgh that begins on Güitiligún Mount, extends toward the south through a flatter terrain but also prone to floods if Huancabamba River overloads more than the safe limit. Nowadays, there are not plans to relocate the Andean capital city because of a simple reason: there’s not space, already, due to the rest are mountains.

About Huascar  Street Fault, if it already opened in Raimondi times, it followed moving in Father Ramírez’s ones, it continued when I knew the city, or when Ingemet published its study, then the phenomenon will continue. Is it true that part of the town will end sliding toward the river? Only time and geology will say it so.

 

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