Cajamarca

Cajamarca is the green Andes. Not the bare altiplano of the south but rolling pasture, dairy cattle, eucalyptus and drystone walls at 2,750 metres in the north of Peru, a landscape that would look at home in another hemisphere if it were not for the light. It is also where the Inca empire ended. Our Cajamarca cap is navy twill with a handwoven earth-tone stripe, the colours of those hills in shadow, the lake family, Qucha.

One afternoon in 1532

In November 1532 the Inca emperor Atahualpa came to meet a hundred and sixty Spaniards in the main square of Cajamarca and was taken prisoner in the space of an hour. To buy his freedom he offered to fill a room once with gold and twice with silver, and did. The room, the Cuarto del Rescate, is still there, a plain stone chamber off the square, the only Inca building left in the town. The gold was melted, the emperor was executed, and the empire that valued cloth over gold was gone within a decade.

The hot springs and the carnival

The Baños del Inca, where Atahualpa was camped when the Spanish arrived, are hot springs a few kilometres out of town, still in use. Cajamarca is dairy country now, cheese and butter and the manjar blanco sold on every corner, and its carnival in February is the loudest in Peru, a week of water, paint and the yunza tree. The weaving in the villages around is wool on backstrap looms, in the same earth palette as the cap's stripe.

The cap named Cajamarca

The Cajamarca is a curved-brim ball cap in navy twill with a handwoven earth-tone stripe band down the centre panel, the adult half of the Callao and Cajamarca navy pair. Its twin in black is the Tacna. See all the ball caps.

Other cities

All twenty on the cities. Cusco · Písac · Urubamba · Maras · Puno · Huaraz · Arequipa · Nazca · Paracas · Callao · Iquitos · Tacna · La Paz · El Alto · Copacabana · Oruro · Potosí · Sucre · Cochabamba. See all the pieces named for Andean towns on headwear and bags, and the cloth families on the weaves.