Kuélap Overview

By Lorraine Caputo

Clouds wrap around the mountains, around the stones of the Forteleza. A silence pervades the air, a silence of centuries. What did these massive walls of Kuélap protect?

Photos cannot accurately portray this ancient citadel. The perimeter wall, containing a number of human and animal burials, measures 20 meters high and over half-kilometer long. You enter the site through one of three entries, wedges cut through this stone pedestal. The passage narrows, allowing only one person to enter at a time. Carvings of faces stare at you.

Within, the jungle-covered four-hectare city is divided into Pueblo Bajo and Pueblo Alto, and is comprised of over 400 circular once-homes, some with the intricate Chachapoya stone friezes. To the South is El Tintero, a towering construction with a hollow core shaped like an inverted inkwell. In Pueblo Alto are two buildings of note. The Castillo, a rectangular building, may have been a mausoleum. In the extreme northern end is a defensive tower, El Torreón, where many weapons were unearthed. There is one restored building. In the entire site, only four quadrangular, probably Incan, edifices exist.

Recent excavations have dramatically changed our understanding of what Kuélap was, who its inhabitants were. No longer are they viewed as a warrior tribe who practiced no farming, but a people whose agricultural production was so great as to allow trade from coast to jungle. El Tintero is now known to have been a ceremonial site, not a torture chamber. It is much older than the 900 years previously thought; occupation began around 400 BC. Archaeologist Alfredo Narváez believes it was a holy site to which Chachapoya peoples from all over the realm came to inter their dearly departed.

Little by little the silence is broken. The stones of Kuélap speak, revealing their history to us.