Chan Chan
— — the city the rain is slowly returning to the earth.
Not only on a wall.
“Adobe walls the colour of the desert north of Trujillo. Nine royal compounds, twenty square kilometres, the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas. The Chimú built it in earth, and the rains of every strong El Niño take a little more of it back. UNESCO has carried it on the endangered list since 1986. The friezes of pelicans and waves are still there, just softer each year.
Chan Chan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Chan Chan sits on the Pacific coast of northern Peru, just outside the modern city of Trujillo in La Libertad Region. It was the capital of the Chimú kingdom from around 900 AD until the Inca conquest in 1470, and it covered roughly twenty square kilometres at its peak: the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas and the largest earthen city ever built. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1986, and added it to the List of World Heritage in Danger the same year.
The city is built almost entirely of adobe (sun-dried mud brick), with walls up to nine metres tall. Nine vast royal compounds, called ciudadelas, hold audience chambers, plazas, and royal burial platforms. The walls carry low-relief friezes of pelicans, cormorants, fish, and the breaking wave that meant abundance to the Chimú, who lived on the sea. The friezes were once polychrome; the colour has gone, and what remains is the moulded shadow of the original work, read by the angle of the afternoon light.
The rains that come with each strong El Niño event are Chan Chan's defining threat. The 1997-98 event eroded large sections; the 2017 coastal Niño and the 2023 event each took more. Peru's Ministry of Culture has roofed key friezes and treated walls with cactus-juice protective coatings, but conservation runs a slow race against the cycle. Dry years are good years; wet years take the city back, one wall at a time.