Cajamarca and around travel guide

Cajamarca is a beautiful colonial town and the most important in the northern highlands. It sits at the edge of a green valley that is ideal for dairy farming. Around the Plaza de Armas are many fine old houses, which are being converted into tasteful hotels, restaurants and galleries to cater for engineers and incomers from the adjacent Yanacocha mining project. The airport has been expanded to cater for the mining personnel, but tourism has yet to catch on to this facility. The mine, now that it is fully operational and looking to expand, has provoked opposition from farmers and created worries over pollution, intruding on the provincial calm of a city once closely tied to its pastoral surroundings. It remains, though, a great place to buy handicrafts, but lest you forget where the money now lies, you can find soapstone carvings of miners with power drills alongside more traditional figures. Outside town are several good haciendas offering bed, board and rural pursuits, while at the Baños del Inca, just up the road, you can unwind as the steam from the thermal waters meets the cool mountain air.