This is the first article in a four-part series on the fishing-and-surfing village of Huanchaco, Peru. Most days you’d never know you were 30 minutes to Trujillo, Peru’s third-largest city when walking Huanchaco’s nearly-empty beach and crumbling colonial backstreets, but on summer weekends the malecón (boardwalk) explodes with Peruvian tourists and foreign surfers. While its position in the Humboldt Current makes the water cooler and the skies cloudier than its famous northern neighbor Mancora, it also thins down the crowds to people serious about their surfing and their relaxing.



Join us over the next few weeks to find out more about the two things that draw foreign travelers to Huanchaco—surfing and volunteering—and what to do if you fall in love and decide to rent an apartment in this town where five blocks from the ocean is considered by locals as too long of a walk.

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Origin Story



Muchik Surf School sits in the elbow of Huanchaco’s malecón (boardwalk). The red-brick porch is a great place to watch the flow of people on a lazy afternoon, and an even better place to dry stacks of surfboards. Inside, Margarita Huamanchumo shares her office space with another dozen surfboards, a scale model of Huanchaco’s famous pier and Ro, the cat, who stretches lazily from his perch on top of the model as we talk.

Margarita is the informational face of Muchik, and her brothers Chicho and Omar are the “profe-surfs.” Together, Chicho and Margarita tell me the story of how Huanchaco was founded.

They say that the god Naylamp was sailing down the coast with his warriors, discovering new places and founding new cities. When he came to the peninsula of Huanchaco, he saw that the cove was filled with abuntant and delicious fish that they had never seen before.

Naylamp and his warriors made an offering to Mamacocha and Pachamama and called the place Wuankarute, which in Muchik means: “The Lagoon of the Golden Fish.” Naylamp went on to found other cities, but three warriors stayed to found the village of Huanchaco, and the civilizations of the Mochica and Chimu.

The warriors were Guaman-Chumum, Shilmaza, and one other whose line has disappeared. The descendents of Shilmaza live now in Huanchaquito (just up the coast) and those of Guaman-Chumum, or Huamanchumo, (“El-ave-que-vuela, The-bird-that-flies,” interjects Margarita), now run a surf school in Huanchaco.

Two Huanchacos



Recent years have seen a boom in Huanchaco’s tourism development, both for the Peruvians escaping to the coast and for the foreigners who come to surf. Hotels mushroom out of vacant lots, and the streetscape daily changes as stacks of bricks and cement-mixing piles move from location to location.

On summer weekends, Huanchaco is a sunny tourist resort town, a playground for local Peruvian tourists snapping photos of the local native fishermen, who still ply the waves in their caballitos de totora (little reed horses). On these weekends, the fishermen make a good portion of their earnings by ferrying tourists through the chilly waves at S/.5 ($ 1.75 US) a ride.

On the weekdays, however, the empty beach is strewn with nets as the fishermen check them for holes and mend them with wooden shuttles wrapped with translucent green filament. The ceviche restaurants are nearly empty, and the lone ice cream vendor on the curb hardly bothers to solicit the few people who wander by.



The tourism boom since the 80’s has drastically affected the little fishing village, both physically as marshes were drained to build hotel complexes and mentally as the influx of outsiders loosened the tight-knit community. Coky Burmester de Prieto remembers the days of her childhood in the 60’s, when “las puertas siempre estaban abiertas, the doors were always open.” Coky and her family lived in nearby Trujillo, but moved to their summer home in Huanchaco every January. Coky laughs. “I could walk into my friend’s house, open the fridge and make myself lunch just like it was my own home.”

Although crime is still next to nonexistent here, the general paranoia that haunts small towns exposed to the world makes itself known in the broken glass-topped walls and iron-barred windows, in the bodegas that operate through the grates on their doorways. “Thirty years ago, people slept with their doors open,” says Margarita Huamanchumo. “But in the ’80’s vandals began to come out and steal the fish that people left outside, and they would enter the houses to rob people.” The idyllic village was transformed, thrust into the tourism limelight.

Filling in the Totorales

Margarita pulls out a piece of paper and sketches me a map, a skinny triangle that is Huanchaco. “Here, where the stadium was, that was a laguna [lake]. People would keep their pigs in the reeds there, like a natural pen.” She draws a square near the center. “Here, in this bodega across the plazuela, there was another pool where people got their drinking water. When they filled in the lagunas and built these buildings, the water kept rising, and it swamped them. Eventually they built the drain into the ocean, so that the lagunas would stay gone.”

Huanchaco’s iconic fishermen build their caballitos de totora from the reeds that once grew in these lagunas. Today, all that remains are a few symbolic pools in the square Margarita has drawn for me, and the declining totorales (reed marshes) to the north of Huanchaco.

The government authority tried to fill in those totorales, as well, Margarita tells me. She has a small look of triumph on her face. “They tried to build houses there, but again the water rose and swamped the homes, so they gave up.” Today all that remains are the unfinished walls rising from the marsh, identical square walls half-finished and crumbling. They were never inhabited.

Always a Resort Town

Foreign tourism for surfing may only have arrived in the last decades, but Huanchaco has always been a resort town. Coky Burmester de Prieto and her sister Silvey Burmester rush over each other to relate the shenanigans they got into as children during summers in Huanchaco. They recall a time that sounds like a Jane Austen novel: an exclusive resort town, night gatherings at the pier with hot chocolate and cookies, day-long picnic outings to the Cerro de la Virgen (Hill of the Virgen) where they would find Chimu and Mochica arrowheads, ceramics, and jewelry.

Some aspects of their childhood remain Huanchaco tradition, such as the rich fish dishes, the chicharron de pescado, causa and ceviche that are still dished up in the restaurants along the malecón.



Something else will sound familiar to today’s tourists, as well:

“Fuimos a surfiar, tambien, we went surfing, as well,” Coky says. “Well, not surfing, but on pechitos [body boards]. We loved it, boys and girls both, we’d always say ‘vamos a correr pechito.’” She laughs, and mimes holding a board in front of her, pushing into the waves. “‘Vamos a correr pechito!’ We went out into Playa La Curva, just north of the pier. The waves were strong there, sometimes the boys would lose their shorts in the waves, it was so strong.”

Changing Lifestyles



Local children still bodyboard in the waves of Playa La Curva (the same beach that the Huamanchumos and their fellow surf instructors take beginning surfers). While the foreigners wade timidly into the water stuffed into wetsuits and booties, the children splash in wearing nothing but bathing suits, oblivious to the cold.

On the beach, the fishermen haul in their caballitos, aware that they may be the last of their generation as their children leave for university, and jobs in bigger cities. But Margarita still sees tourism as an improvement. “For good or for bad the children of the fisherman don’t keep the tradition. Not all, but many of them go to school and study, and they leave.” She shrugs. “But also the pueblo has advanced, it’s become semi-modernized. There are still a few things missing, but all in all we’ve made a new life with tourism.”

For better or for worse, the fishermen with their caballitos and the surf instructors with their tablas hawaianas (Hawaiian boards) will continue to draw tourists from Peru and from abroad. “People come for cultural tourism,” Margarita said. “They come to see the caballitos and the fishermen, to see how they work.”

It’s not a lifestyle that will be lost easily, so long as the ocean continues to provide the golden fish for the fishermen’s living, and the nine point breaks that draw surfers from the world around.

Join us next week to learn just why Huanchaco has built up a reputation as a surfer’s paradise.

Related Posts

1. This is Huanchaco, Part 2: Surfing | by Jessie Kwak
2. This is Huanchaco, Part 4: Housing | by Jessie Kwak
3. This is Huanchaco, Part 3: Volunteering | by Jessie Kwak
4. Fairmail and Kids and photos. | by Robert Kittilson
5. Traveling and Portaits in Peru: Part 1 | by Robert Kittilson

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