A cloud forest village with 219 Chachapoya mummies and a museum that keeps them exactly as they were found — in their original burial bundles
Leymebamba is a small Andean village in the cloud forest of Amazonas Region, Peru, most famous for the Mausoleum of Laguna de los Cóndores — a set of Chachapoya cliff tombs discovered in 1997 above a remote lagoon that contained 219 mummies in original burial bundles, along with textiles, ceramics, and knotted quipus. The mummies and their artefacts were transported to Leymebamba and are now displayed in the remarkable Leymebamba Museum, one of the best-conceived small museums in South America. The Chachapoya ('People of the Clouds') were a pre-Inca Andean culture who built circular stone str…
The Chachapoya culture flourished in the cloud forests of northern Peru from roughly 900 CE until the Inca conquest in the 1470s–1490s. They were fierce resistors of Inca expansion — the Inca Tupa Inca Yupanqui needed multiple campaigns to subdue them — and after conquest many Chachapoya allied with the Spanish against the Inca in the 1530s. The Laguna de los Cóndores mummies were found by local farmers in 1997 and initially looted; archaeologists from the Cultural Association Amazónica secured the site and transferred 219 mummies to Leymebamba for preservation.