🇵🇪 Peru · The Highlands and the Andes
Huaraz is the capital of the Áncash region and the great base camp for mountaineering and trekking in Peru. It sits in the Callejón de Huaylas, a long valley hemmed in between two ranges: to the east the Cordillera Blanca, the highest tropical chain in the world, crowned by Huascarán; to the west the Cordillera Negra, with no glaciers. On clear days you can see several peaks over 6,000 meters from town, and this is where the trips leave from to the turquoise lakes, the glaciers and the multi-day routes that made the area famous.
The city itself is not especially pretty -it was badly hit by the 1970 earthquake and rebuilt in a hurry- but it is practical, warm and perfectly set up for the mountain traveler: agencies, gear rental, guides, hostels and a good scene of restaurants and cafés. What you fall for is not Huaraz but what surrounds it: Laguna 69, Laguna Parón, the Pastoruri glacier, the Llanganuco lakes, the Santa Cruz trek and the archaeological site of Chavín de Huántar, all within a day or a few days.
The big issue here is altitude. Huaraz is above 3,000 m and many trips take you to 4,500-5,000 m within a few hours. Arrive and give yourself one or two easy days before the demanding hikes: drink plenty of water, eat light, walk slowly and, if you need it, fall back on coca tea. Those who respect acclimatization have a great time; those who head up to Laguna 69 straight off the bus usually suffer.
The Callejón de Huaylas has a very long Andean history: the Chavín culture flourished here (around 1200 BC) at nearby Chavín de Huántar, one of the great ceremonial centers of ancient Peru. Huaraz grew as a colonial and republican city, but its modern history is marked by tragedy: the Áncash earthquake of 31 May 1970, one of the worst disasters in Peruvian history, destroyed much of the city and triggered the debris flow that buried neighboring Yungay. Today's Huaraz is, to a large extent, a rebuilt city. More detail on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The region of the snow-capped summits: between the Cordillera Blanca —the highest in the tropics— and the Callejón de Huaylas, home to Huascarán, to the temple of Chavín, to the avalanche that buried Yungay and to turquoise lakes.
Read the history of Áncash →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On 31 May 1970, in less than three minutes, Huaraz lost much of its city and neighboring Yungay vanished entirely under an avalanche of ice and mud. That date explains why the capital of Peruvian mountaineering has almost no colonial old town: the Huaraz that welcomes trekkers today is a city rebuilt at the foot of the very mountains that struck it and that are now its greatest treasure. But its history starts far earlier, in a valley that was the cradle of civilizations thousands of years old.
Huaraz sits in the Callejón de Huaylas, a long Andean valley in the Áncash region, hemmed in between two mountain chains that shape its whole character. To the east rises the Cordillera Blanca, the highest tropical range on the planet, with dozens of peaks above 6,000 meters and glaciers that feed lakes of an impossible turquoise. To the west runs the Cordillera Negra, lower and without permanent snow. Between the two, the Santa river opens the valley along which Huaraz, Carhuaz, Yungay, Caraz and other towns are strung.
This is one of the oldest inhabited regions in the Peruvian Andes. A few hours from Huaraz lies Chavín de Huántar, the great ceremonial center of the Chavín culture, which flourished around 1200 BC and exerted enormous religious and artistic influence over much of the central Andes.
With the arrival of the Incas and later the Spanish, Huaraz established itself as the hub of the valley. Through the colonial period and the republic it grew as the service town of a farming and livestock region, until in the twentieth century it became the capital of the department of Áncash and the gateway to Peruvian mountaineering.
Long before Chavín became a distant reference and before the Incas reached these lands, the Callejón de Huaylas was the cradle of a civilization of its own: the Recuay culture (also called Huaylas), which developed roughly between AD 1 and 600, in the Early Intermediate Period, as a local evolution with strong influence from the Chavín tradition and from the ceramic style known as 'white on red'.
The Recuay settled in the upper part of the Santa river valley, very close to the southern end of the Callejón de Huaylas, and at their peak their influence reached the province of Pallasca to the north, the Marañón river to the east and the upper reaches of the Casma, Huarmey and Santa valleys to the west. They left a very distinctive artistic legacy: sculptural pottery decorated in black, red and white, and a remarkable tradition of stone sculpture -monoliths and sculptures of figures, warriors and mythical beings- much of it now held at the Museo Arqueológico de Áncash, in central Huaraz.
Architecturally, the Recuay were known for building underground chambers and complex funerary structures, the reflection of a hierarchical society with a warrior and priestly elite. Around AD 600, the expansion of the Wari culture from the south began to press on the Callejón de Huaylas, which contributed to the weakening and eventual disappearance of the Recuay culture as an independent political entity, though its artistic and archaeological legacy remains key to understanding the pre-Hispanic identity of the region.
The modern history of Huaraz and of the whole Callejón de Huaylas is split in two by 31 May 1970. That Sunday afternoon, at 15:23, an earthquake of magnitude close to 7.9 shook the Áncash region. By its death toll it was the worst natural disaster in Peru's history: estimates speak of tens of thousands dead across the area, and Huaraz was devastated, much of its old town in ruins.
The quake also set off an even greater tragedy in neighboring Yungay. The shaking broke an enormous mass of ice and rock off the west face of the north peak of Huascarán, which swept down the valley as a debris flow at an estimated speed of between 200 and 500 km/h. The avalanche completely buried the city of Yungay and the town of Ranrahirca; in Yungay around thirty thousand people died and only a few hundred survived, many of them because they were on the cemetery hill or in the stadium when the slide arrived.
Huaraz, like Yungay, had to rebuild almost from scratch. That is why the city today looks modern and somewhat improvised, with few traces of its colonial past: most of it was lost that day. Understanding this helps you see Huaraz with different eyes: it is not a museum-city but a resilient one, raised again at the foot of the same mountains that struck it one day and that are now its greatest wealth.
Before it became a trekking mecca, the Cordillera Blanca was a subject of scientific study. The Italian-Peruvian naturalist Antonio Raimondi traveled the region in the nineteenth century to survey its mining potential, and his observations were set down in his work 'El departamento de Áncash y sus riquezas minerales' (1873). In the early twentieth century, German geologists and geographers such as Gustav Steinmann, Wilhelm Sievers and August Weberbauer carried on the scientific mapping of its peaks and glaciers.
The founding moment of mountaineering, or 'andinismo', in the area came in 1932, when a joint German-Austrian expedition -Erwin Schneider, Hermann Hoerlin, Franz Bernard, Philipp Borchers and Erwin Hein- reached the summit of Huascarán Sur for the first time, the highest point in Peru at 6,768 meters, by what would later be known as the normal route through the Garganta. That same year two members of the expedition, Schneider and Hein, also topped Artesonraju, the pyramid-shaped mountain that would become famous for its resemblance to the Paramount Pictures logo. Earlier, in 1908, a US expedition that included the pioneer Annie Smith Peck had claimed the first ascent of Huascarán Norte, a milestone disputed by the climbers of the day themselves.
These expeditions of the 1930s marked the start of a long tradition of international mountaineering in the Cordillera Blanca, one that turned Huaraz -then a modest provincial town- into the obligatory starting point for climbers from all over the world. That mountain calling, interrupted but not erased by the 1970 earthquake, is what underpins the city's identity for travelers today.
After the rebuilding, Huaraz found its definitive calling: to be the base for mountaineering and trekking in Peru. The nearby Cordillera Blanca, much of it declared Huascarán National Park in 1975 and recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and a Biosphere Reserve, turned the city into a magnet for climbers, hikers and travelers from all over the world, carrying on the tradition opened by the 1932 expeditions.
The routes that made the region famous all start in Huaraz: the hike to Laguna 69, the trip to Laguna Parón under Artesonraju, the Llanganuco lakes, the Pastoruri glacier and multi-day crossings such as the Santa Cruz trek, among legendary peaks like Alpamayo, considered by many one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. On top of that come the archaeological heritage of Chavín de Huántar and the legacy of the Recuay culture, a few hours away by road.
Today the economy of Huaraz turns largely on this nature and adventure tourism: agencies, guides, gear shops, hostels, cafés and restaurants. The city thus combines its pre-Hispanic Andean roots, its memory of the earthquake and almost a century of mountaineering tradition into a very contemporary identity: base camp for one of the most spectacular mountain ranges on the planet.