FACTORTIERRA

It looks like an enormous black egg embeded on the mountain slope. By Nelson Peñaherrera . Photos by Estany Tineo .   Cambia a español. SAPILLICA , Peru – “No, sir, the truck to Coletas departures tomorrow at five in the morning and gets back in the afternoon, assures us the driver of a motorcycle used as a taxi throough the tortuos dusty ways around this town. It is obvious that Juan, the driver, is trying to convince me for hiring the service.   It’s Thursday afternoon and since we have arrived to organize a minimum recognition logistics of the petroglyph our partner Marco Paulini reported last July , we’ve just found supporting promises but very few options for visiting the monolyth which highlights a spiral trace carved on basaltic rock. “ Are you going to The Devils’ Rock? That rock is bad! Pregnant women don’t pass over there,” a sixty-year-old lady warns me when she listens to my negotiation process with Juan. I take a little time to chat, hustle our producer ...

By Nelson Peñaherrera . Photos by Estany Tineo . SAPILLICA , Peru – It is five kilometers to the southeast of Sapillica town, in Trujillo [pronounce “Truhiyo”] Community. The rock is very smaller (more or less one meter height and a meter and a half length), hidden among corn fields, but the drawings are relatively pretty conserved, performing anthropomorphic shapes and simplified faces and a cat, what gives the name to the site. From here, it is possible to look at Loma Alta . We could be in a seq’e , or a virtual line that connects two sacred sites. Unlike Loma Alta Petroglyph, what is in the heights and beside a way, Cat’s is slope down of Sapillica [pronounce “Sapijicah”] and walking for about 15 minutes from the same way that connects to the coast. However, according to the research by Sapillica District Municipality’s Alesban López, this petroglyph is the nearest to district capital. Another detail of this place is its closeless from any actual water flow, but for ge...

A Catholic cemetery keeps a… pantheistic shrine? By Nelson Peñaherrera . Photos by Alesban López .   SAPILLICA , Peru – “Cachirís Mount is straight there and Pilán Mount is mostly on the right,” Sapillica [pronounce “Sapijicah”] District Municipality’s Alesban López points me out, whom I am riding a motorcycle again , on our way to Tunal, 37 km away the southwest of the district capital. A local told him there are rocks “pretty identical” to those he featured on his Facebook account . We have to go down from Sapillica town until Timbes [pronounce “Timbehs”], then climbing up until 1617 meters altitude according to the GPS ( global positioning system ) device the crew carries within.   An hour 20 minutes, at least on motorcycle, by the west flank of Andean Western Range, viewing the coast along the full trail. In Tunal, we are on the spine of the mountain, the rocks are so little (1,5 meters by si, approximately) those just could carve one petroglyph per each one...

The agricultural-exporting present  and a highly possible archaeological past are its two main assets, at the moment. All photographs by Ángelo Azabache , distributed by FACTORTIERRA   SULLANA, Peru - In the place where the towns of West sullana and Jíbito are up to join, but more aligned near Chira River , it is located La Capilla, the site where a same-named big estate was controlled from, in which farms the Bishop Baltazar Jaime Martínez d Compañón y Bujanda gota gifted property to founding Santísima Trinidad de La Punta Village, on July 8th, 1783, the coretown of Sullana Metropolitan Area the second largest of Piura Region. Then, La Capilla belonged to Del Castillo Family and seemed to enlarge across  the space that cities of Sullana and Bellavista occupy today, although the official history says the estate which terrain the town was founded, was called La Punta (The Point, in English) what might explain its initial name, however its founder tried to name...