Travel Peru, Peru Blog

“To the left, Sergio, to the left! , what are you doing? , the foam is going to screw you up, man…to the left!”
I hardly hear him. He is out there, but I am not able to see him. I barely tell the contrast between the dark blue sea and the white horizontal line which is growing higher and nearer. Pulling my arms with strength, I feel my shoulders ache. “I am gonna make it, yes, yes, come on, man!”.
I am dead wrong. The wave is just above me, and my board is not straight to the wall of water, but sideways, so there isn´t any hope for me. I hold the board tightly when the foam embraces me with such force that it makes me spin, and I lose grid of my board. I just disappear under the cold water.
After seconds which seems to be a lifetime, my head gets off the water. I gasp and cough. Naively, I swim towards the board instead of pulling the line or cord attached to my ankle, but it is too late: another wave. ¡Splash!
For God’s sake, what am I doing here?

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Lima, february the 19th, 1564. A man is about to die.
It is a warm summer after midnight, and a masked man is getting down a stepladder from a balcony. Suddenly the stepladder breaks, and the man falls to the ground. Five neighbors come over and start beating the man. When a sixth neighbor arrives, the man is already dead. The man´s name: Diego Lopez de Zuñiga.
This would have been another love affair story, but the man was the count of Nieva, fourth viceroy of Peru. The story appears in the “Tradiciones Peruanas”, written by the Peruvian author Ricardo Palma.
Balconies were silent witnesses of this kind of stories during much of the Spaniard colonial period in most of Peru, but especially in Lima.

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