Ancash, northern Peru
Huachuma at Chavín
The plant this Foundation grows is carved into the stone of a temple that has stood in the northern Andes for around three thousand years.
The Temple the site
Chavín de Huántar stands in the mountains of Ancash in northern Peru, near the headwaters of the Amazon where the river is still a creek. Part of the complex is underground, and narrow stone galleries run beneath it.
At the heart of those galleries stands the Lanzón, a carved granite shaft four and a half meters tall showing a fanged figure, which was the temple’s principal cult image. Tenoned stone heads were set into the outer walls.
The plant is in the carving. A figure in the Circular Plaza holds a Huachuma the way somebody would hold a staff, and it is the oldest clear evidence that people worked with this cactus in something like the way they do now.
The style is flattened and doubled, with faces resolving into other faces the longer they are looked at, and people who spend time with it often compare it with cubism.
Dating ranges differ across the literature. The radiocarbon work of the last twenty years puts the temple complex at about 1200 to 500 BC, and the figure holding the cactus in the Circular Plaza at around 750 BC; Chavín is described as a center of pilgrimage across a wider span than that.
The Galleries underground
The galleries are narrow passages cut under the temple. Outside there is the river, the wind and the birds. Inside there is none of that, and no daylight either.
Hamid Jabbar and Dani Reardon went with Miguel Mendiburu in June 2026. Ten people sat together in an unlit chamber there, close enough to hear one another breathe.
“When we all sat, ten of us, you could kind of hear your own breathing, probably feel your own heartbeat, and every sound was so loud, because there was no background sound.”
Hamid Jabbar
Taking away every outside signal is an old technology.
The Journey getting there
Chavín was a center of pilgrimage for centuries and it has never been quick to reach. The road from Lima runs overnight to Huaraz and then three hours up into the mountains.
A Working Site the site now
Chavín de Huántar is a working archaeological site with a ticket office, guards and visitors. The galleries carry small lamps so that nobody walks into a wall, and during a festival there are fireworks overhead.
An Older Garden across the river
Across the river from the temple grounds there is a garden that one person has been planting for about twenty years. It holds thousands of mature Huachuma in precise rows, and it can be seen through the trees from inside the temple.
Miguel Mendiburu saw those cactus heads from the temple on an earlier visit and went over to look. The garden at Taray is what came of it.
Growing It Here Taray, Sacred Valley
Huachuma grows wild in the country around Chavín. It does not grow in the Sacred Valley, where most people now come to drink it, so what is served there travels by road from the north.
The Foundation plants at Taray, in the valley itself, on a hillside cut into stepped terraces as the ancient sites of the Andes were farmed, so that in time less of the cactus has to make that journey.
