TRAVERSE Issue 51 - December 2025 | Page 61

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ceramics more than two thousand years ago. In a country where around six million people still live without running water and villages are created overnight with the occupation of the territory, the eye must quickly get used to the difficult situations in which those far from the big cities and the riches of tourism live.
First the explorers and then the Conquistadors rewrote the history of the American continent, managing to annihilate millennia of civilizations which had nothing to envy of old
Europe in terms of scientific and technological discoveries, but above all in terms of its organisation. Whether they achieved it with the power of weapons or by hiding economic interests under mass evangelization, this is now the established truth.
Time hides, but does not destroy, what man has created. Today we know that over the last five thousand years this area of Peru hosted numerous highly advanced civilisations. Trujillo, founded in 1534 by the coloniser Francisco
Pizarro, thrived thanks to the fertile valley in which it stands; this allowed the inhabitants to develop a more equal society attentive to social rights. Trujillo was the first city to ask for independence from Spain and to see the birth of the workers ' party which challenged the system by clashing with the totalitarian regimes starting from the great crisis of 1929. We like to think that the spirit of rebellion resides in the genes acquired from the Moche civilization whose testimony lies in the sites of Huacas del Sol y de la
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