Tacna

Tacna is the far south: a desert city an hour from the Chilean border, low and dry and warm, in a valley of vineyards and olive groves that the desert would take back in a season without the river. It is the one city in the range that is not in the mountains or on the coast but between them. Our Tacna cap is black twill with a single handwoven indigo stripe, the night family, Tuta: dark ground, one line of colour.

The heroic city

Peru calls Tacna the Heroic City. After the War of the Pacific it spent almost fifty years under Chilean rule, from 1880 until a plebiscite returned it to Peru in 1929, and the city marks the date every August with a procession of the flag through the streets. The parabolic arch on the main promenade commemorates the war's heroes. The cathedral was built by Eiffel's firm, and the Ferrocarril Tacna Arica, the oldest railway in the country, still runs to the coast.

The valley

At 550 metres the valley is warm enough for grapes, olives and the pisco that the south of Peru is known for, and the town is greener than the desert around it has any right to be. Tacna's cloth tradition is the traders' one: the highland aguayo comes down from Puno and the altiplano, and the Aymara communities in the hills above the city weave in the same dark, dense style as the far side of the border.

The cap named Tacna

The Tacna is a curved-brim ball cap in black twill with a handwoven indigo stripe band down the centre panel, one of the twill ball caps. It belongs to the night family with the Potosí and the Urubamba. Its twin in navy is the Cajamarca.

Other cities

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