🇵🇪 Peru · The Amazon (Jungle)
Oxapampa and Pozuzo are one of the most surprising corners of the Peruvian Amazon: two towns in the central jungle of Pasco where, deep in tropical forest, there's an unexpected Austro-German, Tyrolean air. Wooden houses with gabled roofs, flower-filled balconies, European surnames, plantain strudel and Oktoberfest-style festivals sit alongside the lushness of the cloud-forest fringe. The reason is a 19th-century immigration story that left a cultural mark found nowhere else in the country.
Oxapampa, at around 1,800 meters, is the larger town and the usual base for exploring the area. It has a pleasant climate, very photogenic European-style architecture, an active coffee industry, and it's the center of the Oxapampa-Asháninka-Yánesha Biosphere Reserve, recognized by UNESCO. Pozuzo, deeper into the jungle and lower down, is the heart of the Austro-German colony: it's home to the Emperor Wilhelm I Bridge, the Schafferer Museum and the church, testimony to the ordeal of the first settlers.
The trip combines culture, nature and food: you can visit coffee farms, walk to waterfalls and through the forests of the biosphere reserve, meet the Yánesha and Asháninka Indigenous communities nearby, and try a cuisine that mixes European flavors with Amazonian ingredients. Come by road from Lima (via La Merced), bring a light jacket for Oxapampa's nights, quick-dry clothes, repellent and walking shoes, and give it several days to enjoy both towns without rushing.
Oxapampa and Pozuzo owe their unique character to 19th-century Austro-German settlement. In 1857, a group of Tyrolean and Rhenish German settlers left Europe for Peru and, after a brutal journey, founded Pozuzo around 1859, deep in the jungle. Decades later, in 1891, descendants of those settlers founded Oxapampa. Today the area is also the core of the Oxapampa-Asháninka-Yánesha Biosphere Reserve, recognized by UNESCO in 2010. More detail on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The high-altitude mining region and the central jungle of Oxapampa: from the stone forest of Huayllay to the Austro-German colonies of Pozuzo, between the highest puna and the Amazon.
Read the history of Pasco →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Picture crossing the Andes on foot and by mule, over passes above 4,700 meters, hacking the trail open with a machete as you go, only to end up founding a Tyrolean village deep in the Amazon. That is, literally, what the founders of Pozuzo did: of the 304 Europeans who set sail for Peru, 35 died on the way, some 120 gave up along the route and only 170 reached their destination. Behind the little gabled houses and the plantain strudel lies one of the most extreme migration sagas of 19th-century South America.
In the mid-19th century Peru was living through the guano boom and, at the same time, looking to bring its vast, thinly populated Amazon into the rest of the country. President Ramón Castilla pushed a European immigration policy to 'colonize' the central rainforest, then all but unexplored by the Peruvian state beyond the territories of the Yánesha and Asháninka peoples who had lived there for centuries. The idea was to attract families of European farmers who would 'open up' the high jungle, lay roads and build a farming economy where the state had no reach.
The man charged with turning that plan into reality was the German baron Cosme Damián Schütz von Holzhausen, who signed the colonization contract on 5 December 1855 and traveled to Europe to recruit settlers. He gathered a group of around 300 people, mostly Catholic peasants from Tyrol (today split between Austria and Italy) and from the Rhine and Moselle region of Germany, among them the priest José Egg, whose surname you can still read on shopfronts in Oxapampa. None of them imagined what lay ahead between the port of Antwerp and the mountains of Pasco.
The contract Schütz von Holzhausen signed on 5 December 1855 with Ramón Castilla's government committed the settlers to opening a road and populating a rainforest region with no access routes, in exchange for land and support. With that agreement in hand, the baron traveled to Europe in 1856 and recruited the families who would make the crossing.
On 26 March 1857, some 300 people —mostly Tyroleans, plus a group of Rhinelanders from the Rhine and the Moselle— sailed from the port of Antwerp aboard the sailing ship 'Norton', bound for Peru. They reached Callao in early August 1857 and, after the obligatory quarantine, continued north to the port of Huacho, where the hardest part of the journey began: crossing the Andes on foot and by mule, over passes above 4,700 meters via Cerro de Pasco, then dropping down into the cloud forest, cutting the trail with machetes as they went.
It was an epic and tragic march. Between the sea crossing, the altitude, disease and hunger, some 35 people died, around 15 babies were born and about 120 settlers left the group at different points along the way. Finally, on 25 July 1859 —Saint James's day, patron of pilgrims— some 170 people reached the valley of the Pozuzo river and founded their new homeland there, in the heart of the Amazon. It was one of the most ambitious —and most brutal— European colonization projects in 19th-century South American history.
For decades Pozuzo stayed almost completely cut off from the rest of Peru: there were no roads linking it directly to the highlands or the coast, and communication depended on river routes and trails hacked open by machete. That isolation, paradoxically, let the settlers hold on with remarkable fidelity to their language (a Tyrolean-German dialect), their Catholic faith, their customs and their architecture, almost a European time capsule in the middle of the Peruvian rainforest.
By the end of the 19th century the Pozuzo valley was no longer enough for a growing population: its steep terrain limited any farming expansion. In 1891 a group of 32 families descended from the original settlers, led by Enrique Böttger Treu and with the help of Franciscan missionaries from Quillazú, set off south in search of more fertile land. On 30 August 1891 they officially founded Oxapampa, in a broad valley some 80 kilometers from Pozuzo, with the help of and alongside the Yánesha communities already living in the area.
The 20th century brought the area gradually into the rest of the country. In 1944 the province of Oxapampa was created within the department of Pasco, with the town of Oxapampa as its capital, cementing its administrative and economic role in the central rainforest. Better roads —always winding and prone to landslides— slowly brought Oxapampa and Pozuzo closer to La Merced, Chanchamayo and, eventually, Lima.
Over the generations, the settlers' descendants mixed with Andean migrants and with the Yánesha and Asháninka Indigenous communities, producing a distinctive mixed identity: European surnames alongside Amazonian and Andean traditions. The economy diversified into cattle raising, farming and, especially since the late 20th century, a high-quality high-altitude coffee that is now one of the area's main activities.
More than a century and a half after Pozuzo was founded, the settlers' legacy is still alive and visible. In Pozuzo, the Plaza Los Colonos and the surrounding streets show off the characteristic Tyrolean architecture: wooden houses with gabled roofs, flower-filled balconies and an atmosphere that blends European tradition with rainforest hospitality. The Puente Emperador Guillermo I, a picturesque suspension bridge over the Pozuzo river built by the settlers and named after the German emperor of the day, is one of its symbols. The Museo Schafferer, for its part, holds original documents, personal belongings and photographs of the first immigrants of 1859, and tells the story of the colonization in a clear, authentic way.
That legacy goes beyond architecture: it shows up in the food, with European dishes adapted to Amazonian ingredients —strudel made with plantain instead of apple, for instance—, in family surnames, in the music and in festivals like Pozuzofest, a celebration modeled on Oktoberfest. Oxapampa, meanwhile, added to that inheritance an identity of its own tied to quality coffee and to nature.
Today the area also has international recognition: in 2010 UNESCO declared the Oxapampa-Asháninka-Yánesha Biosphere Reserve, which protects the cloud forests, the biodiversity and the territories of the Asháninka and Yánesha Indigenous peoples, with Yanachaga-Chemillén National Park as its core. The reserve's very name sums up what makes the place rich: a singular meeting of the settlers' European heritage, ancestral Indigenous cultures and exuberant nature.