Hostels and cheap hotels in Trujillo

Pizarro, on his second voyage to Peru in 1528, sailed by the site of ancient Chan Chan, then still a major city and an important regional centre of Inca rule. He returned to establish a Spanish colony in the same valley, naming it Trujillo in December 1534 after his birthplace in Estremadura, and officially founding it in March 1535. A year later, in 1536, the town was besieged by the Inca Manco's forces during the second rebellion against the conquistadores. Many thousands of Conchuco Indian warriors, allied with the Incas, swarmed down to Trujillo, killing Spaniards and collaborators on the way and offering their victims to Catequil, the tribal deity. Surviving this attack, Trujillo grew to become the main port of call for the Spanish treasure fleets, sailors wining and dining here on their way between Lima and Panama. By the seventeenth century it was a walled city covering three square miles, with 56 blocks that contained some three thousand houses. The only sections of the walls remaining are the Herrera rampart and a small piece of the façade on Avenida España. Trujillo continued to be a centre of popular rebellion, declaring its independence from Spain in the Plaza de Armas in 1820, long before the Liberators arrived. The enigmatic APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) leader, Haya de la Torre, was born here in 1895, running for president, after years of struggle, in the elections of 1931. The dictator, Sanchez Cerro, however, counted the votes and declared himself the winner. APRA was outlawed and Haya de la Torre imprisoned, provoking Trujillo's middle classes to stage an uprising. Over one thousand deaths resulted, many of them supporters of APRA, who were taken out to the fields of Chan Chan by the truckload and shot. Even now, the 1932 massacre has a resonance amongst the people of Trujillo, particularly the old APRA members and the army, and you can still see each neighbourhood declaring its allegiance in graffiti. Hostels in Trujillo