🇵🇪 Peru · The Coast
Ica is the capital of Peru's desert and of its wine. Ringed by golden dunes and vineyards, it is a warm, sunny city all year round, famous as the cradle of pisco -the grape spirit that is a national point of pride- and for having the Huacachina oasis on its doorstep, that pool ringed by palm trees and giant dunes that looks lifted from a Sahara postcard. A few hours from Lima, it is an obligatory stop on the southern route.
The city was founded by the Spanish in 1563 and the first vines were planted from the sixteenth century, giving rise to a wine-growing tradition centuries old. Today you can tour historic wineries such as Tacama (considered the oldest vineyard in South America) or El Catador, taste piscos and wines, and get a feel for the Vendimia, the big March festival where the grapes are trodden. Add the Museo Regional, with mummies and elongated skulls from the Paracas and Nazca cultures, and you have culture for a good while.
Most people reach Ica by bus from Lima (about 4-5 hours) or as a stop on the Paracas-Huacachina-Nazca route. The typical plan combines the city (historic center, museum and wineries) with an escape to Huacachina for dune buggies and sandboarding, and sunset over the desert. One or two days is enough to get a taste of the wine, the dunes and the Ica sun.
The city of Ica was founded by the Spanish conquistador Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera on 17 June 1563, as 'Villa de Valverde'. From the sixteenth century came the vines that gave rise to wine and pisco production. Before that, the valley was home to the Paracas and Nazca cultures, whose legacy can be seen at the Museo Regional. More detail on the history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In the driest desert on the Peruvian coast, where it almost never rains, the sand did something astonishing: it kept bodies, textiles and skulls for more than two thousand years, like a natural vacuum chamber. That is why the Ica valley holds mummies with skin and hair intact, embroidered textiles that still keep their colors, and skulls elongated and drilled by surgeries thousands of years old. Before it was the land of pisco and dunes, Ica was the funerary laboratory of ancient Peru. Long before the conquistadors arrived, the Ica valley was home to some of the most remarkable cultures of ancient Peru. The Paracas culture flourished here (approx. 700 BC - AD 200), famous for its embroidered textiles, its funerary bundles and its skull trepanations, and later the Nazca culture (approx. 100 BC - AD 700), known for its polychrome pottery and for the lines traced across the neighboring desert.
In the late period the Ica or Chincha-Ica culture also emerged, with pottery and weaving of its own, before falling under Inca rule. All of that legacy -mummies, elongated skulls, textiles and pottery- is kept today at the Museo Regional de Ica, one of the finest archaeological collections on the Peruvian coast. The extremely dry desert acted as a natural preservative, keeping fabrics and bodies for centuries.
The Spanish city of Ica was founded on 17 June 1563 by the conquistador Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera, under the name 'Villa de Valverde del Valle de Ica'. Like so many colonial cities, it was laid out around a central square, and land and encomiendas were handed out across the fertile valley.
The location was no accident: the Ica valley, warm and sunny but with river water and groundwater, turned out to be ideal for farming. Very soon the Spanish brought in the grapevine, and from the sixteenth century Ica became one of the great wine-growing centers of the region. Out of those vineyards would come wine and, later, pisco.
Over its history Ica suffered major earthquakes -a risk along the whole Peruvian coast- and rebuildings, as well as changes of site in its early days. Even so, it held on to its identity as a city of desert, sun and wine, which it keeps to this day.
If anything defines Ica, it is pisco. When the Spanish planted vines in the valley they first made wine; over time, distilling the fermented must, pisco was born, a grape spirit that would become a Peruvian banner. Ica is considered the historic heart of its production, with wineries that have been running for centuries.
Among them stands out the Tacama estate, presented as the oldest vineyard in South America, and much-loved wineries such as El Catador, which keeps up the traditional treading of the grapes and is famous for its pisco sour. Others such as Vista Alegre, Lazo and Ocucaje round out the so-called Ruta del Pisco y el Vino, where visitors tour the presses and taste.
The high point of this culture is the Vendimia, the harvest festival held every March. For several days there is barefoot grape treading in the presses, the crowning of the Reina de la Vendimia, music, dancing, food and, of course, plenty of pisco and wine. It is the best time to understand why Ica and pisco are inseparable.
The name Huacachina comes from the Quechua wakay ('to weep') and china ('woman' or 'female'), and means roughly 'weeping woman'. That etymology is the basis of several oral legends that explain, in mythical terms, the origin of this small oasis in the middle of the desert, passed down from generation to generation with no single author or text to fix them.
The most widespread version tells the story of a beautiful princess (sometimes called Huacca China) who bathed naked in the oasis, admiring her beauty in a mirror. Surprised by a hunter or a stranger, she fled in terror into the desert: the folds of her cloak, as it fell, turned into the dunes that ring the lagoon today, and the mirror she dropped and shattered gave rise to the sheet of water. Unable to escape, the princess sank into the water and was turned forever into a mermaid, who some say can still be seen or heard on full-moon nights.
Other versions speak of a maiden from the village of Tacara who wept for the death of her beloved, an Inca warrior fallen in battle, with weeping so deep and so long that her tears formed the lagoon; or of the goddess Huacca China, who bathed in the Ica river and whose feather headdress, as it fell, turned into the oasis. Whichever version you prefer, these legends reflect the wonder still stirred by this sheet of fresh water in the middle of dunes up to 100 meters high, an uncommon geological phenomenon that is today the great tourist icon of the region.
The recent history of Ica is marked by the earthquake of 15 August 2007. At 18:40, a magnitude 7.9 quake shook the central Peruvian coast for some 210 seconds, the strongest recorded in the area in five decades. Ica and neighboring Pisco were the hardest-hit cities, with an estimated intensity of VIII-IX on the Modified Mercalli scale; more than 4,500 aftershocks were recorded in the following weeks.
The toll was devastating: around 600 people dead, more than 2,000 injured and some 432,000 affected across the region, with severe damage to homes, churches, schools and shops. The emblematic Santuario del Señor de Luren, the city's most beloved church, was badly damaged and had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. The economic impact was harsh too: thousands of jobs were lost in the months after the quake, hitting local retail and services especially hard.
The Peruvian government created the Fondo de Reconstrucción del Sur (FORSUR) to coordinate the region's recovery, with an estimated budget of several hundred million dollars for housing, health, education and sanitation. The process was slow and not free of corruption complaints and bureaucratic delays; almost two decades later, the rebuilding is still a subject of debate in the region, though Ica has picked itself up with new infrastructure, hotels and an economy that once again turns on tourism, wine and pisco.