So you end up in Trujillo and need a place to stay. How about Hotel Peru? It offers a bar and a bed, which are just about the only things you need in any hotel. What more could you ask for?
A week ago Steve Lawler and I met up with a little fishing party from Scotland at Hotel Peru and we enjoyed a fine evening there. The boys from Scotland told us they were very impressed with the place. They said it was cheap and clean. It was quiet too. It is a pretty big place but it seemed on the Friday evening, as we were putting away a couple of beers, that we were the only people there.
Why call a hotel in the Middle of Extremadura Hotel Peru? This puzzled me a little at first and then, in discovering the answer to this question, I came to understand a little of the history of the town. For a little town, Trujillo has a very big history.
Trujillo´s most famous son was Francisco Pizarro, who was one of a number of conquistadores who left Extremadura seeking adventures and wealth in the New World. Pizarro was an illiterate and illegitimate adventurer who was born in the town and went on to lead an expedition that lead to the fall of the Inca Empire. He more or less did to the Incas what a distant cousin Hernán Cortés did to the Aztecs.
In the town square, which is really beautiful, there is a fine statue of Pizarro on his horse. There is a very similar statue in Lima. I took a few snaps of the Trujillo statue when Steve and I wandered around the plaza on Saturday evening.
Back in the day the Inca emperor was a guy called Atahualpa. Pizarro managed to capture him and he was held to ransom. He told the rest of Incas “you can have this fella back if you fill up a couple of rooms full of stuff made out of silver and another room with stuff made out of gold”
The Incas duly obliged but Pizarro went and had Atahualpa killed anyway on a bunch of trumped up charges. And all of this happened in what has since become Peru.
Pizarro on his horse. I took a photo of this statue but, frankly, it wash´t great. This one was pinched from Wikipedia.
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