Paramonga

Paramonga is often called a fortress due to its staggered pyramid of four levels of enormous proportions constructed on a hill, which somewhat resembles a European medieval castle, though it was built prior to Spanish colonization of the area.

In 1533, Estete accompanying Hernando Pizarro and his little dispatch of 'twenty horsemen and some arquebusiers'[2] with a few of Atahualpa's retainers acting as guides descended from Cajamarca, by orders of the leader of the conquistador band in Peru, the brother of Hernando, Francisco Pizarro, who had settled in Cajamarca alongside a captive Atahualpa Inca since the previous year in order to wait for the completion of enormous ransom payment of gold and silver proposed by Atahualpa for his own rescue, however as time passed the supply of precious metal artifacts arriving at Cajamarca had significantly decreased over the past months, the Spaniards were growing impatient and the tensions between the newly arrived Almagrists and the Pizarrists were beginning to escalate, in an attempt to complete the payment of his ransom Atahaulpa then proposes to the Spanish to loot Pachacamac, city where riches abounded but held by priests that sided with Huascar in the Inca civil war and thus were enemies of Atahualpa.

"... and another day we went to sleep in a large town that is called Parmunga, which is next to the sea, has a Strong House, with five blind fences, painted of elaborately on the inside and outside with its walls carved, the way it is done in Spain, with two tigers (pumas?)

at the main entrance ..."[3]Another chronicler, Pedro Cieza de León, passed Paramonga during his trip from the City of the Kings (Lima) to Trujillo in 1541.

The buildings were very handsome, and many wild beasts and birds were painted on the walls, which are now all in ruins and undermined in many places by those who have searched for buried gold and silver.