Huascarán National Park, Peru · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Chan Chan, capital of the Chimú civilisation, is the largest adobe city ever built and the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas, once covering twenty square kilometres and housing up to a hundred thousand people using nothing but sun-dried mud brick. It rose to power in one of the driest deserts on earth, engineering canals and aqueducts to solve a chronic lack of water. The irony is a cruel one. Today, the very thing Chan Chan never had enough of is what's slowly destroying it, torrential rains, a side effect of a changing climate, are washing the ancient city away one storm at a time.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.