Huaraz

Huaraz is the town you go to for the mountains. It sits at 3,050 metres in a valley between two ranges, and the one to the east, the Cordillera Blanca, is the highest tropical mountain range on earth, a wall of ice that includes Huascarán, the highest peak in Peru. The lakes below the glaciers are a colour that does not look real. Our Huaraz snapback takes its teal from them.

The mountains

The Cordillera Blanca runs for about 180 kilometres with more than thirty peaks over 6,000 metres, Huascarán at 6,768. Huaraz is the base for all of it: the Santa Cruz trek, the day walk to Laguna 69, the climbers' routes. The town itself was flattened by the 1970 earthquake and rebuilt plain, so nobody comes for the architecture. They come for what is above it.

The glacial lakes

Meltwater from the glaciers carries fine rock flour that never settles, and it turns the lakes a milky turquoise that shifts to deep teal in shadow. Laguna Parón, Laguna 69, Llanganuco: the names are on every trekker's list. Weaving in the Callejón de Huaylas, the valley Huaraz sits in, is Quechua and older than the town, and the blues and greens here are cooler than in the south.

The cap named Huaraz

The Huaraz is a flat-brim snapback in full handwoven Andean stripe with glacier-teal chakana embroidery at the front. It is a rainbow-family cloth, K'uychi, chosen for the teal that runs through it. One of three snapbacks we make, and the coolest in colour.

Other cities

All twenty on the cities. Cusco · Písac · Urubamba · Maras · Puno · Arequipa · Nazca · Paracas · Callao · Iquitos · Cajamarca · 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.