Museo Leymebamba

The Museo Leymebamba, inaugurated in June 2000, houses over 200 Chachapoya and Inca artifacts, including 219 mummies and 2,300 funerary items, recovered from the Laguna de los Cóndores in 1997.

Planning your visit

The Leymebamba museum was built for a specific emergency. In 1997, looters disturbed a cliff-ledge burial site above the Laguna de los Cóndores in the cloud forest of northern Peru, and a rescue excavation recovered 219 mummies and some 2,300 funerary objects of the Chachapoya culture, later under Inca administration. Nothing existed locally to house them. The museum opened in 2000, funded internationally and built in regional style with adobe and tile, specifically to keep the material in the region it came from rather than shipping it to Lima.

The mummy chamber is climate-controlled and viewed through glass: bundled figures in the crouched Chachapoya burial posture, many with preserved textiles, some with faces stitched into the wrappings. Alongside are quipus — the knotted cord records used for accounting — ceramics, and ethnobotanical displays covering local plant use.

The Chachapoya were the "cloud people", a highland culture the Inca subdued only shortly before the Spanish arrived, and the region remains remote and lightly visited.

Bookable options are day tours from Chachapoyas, typically combining the museum with the Revash mausoleums — cliff-face burial houses painted red and white, set into a rock wall and viewed from below. The distances and mountain roads make organised transport the practical choice. Current departures are shown below.