The desert city being washed away by rain

Here's the Chan Chan fact that I still find cruelly ironic. This was once the largest adobe city ever built anywhere, capital of the Chimú civilisation, covering twenty square kilometres and housing up to a hundred thousand people, all of it made from sun-dried mud brick, in one of the driest deserts on earth. The Chimú built canals and aqueducts specifically to solve a chronic lack of water.

Now the exact opposite problem is destroying it. Torrential rains, a side effect of a changing climate, are slowly washing the ancient city away, storm by storm, a fate that would have seemed almost impossible to the people who built it around the constant absence of water in the first place.

I painted Chan Chan in watercolour and ink, those weathered mud walls against the desert. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Chan Chan, Peru · Travel Poster