PACASMAYO PIER
Pacasmayo Pier is probably the icon of the town, together with the wave. In 1871 construction began of the Pier (“Muelle de Pacasmayo”) and the train Station. It became a very important port for the boats exporting tobacco to Chile and also for exporting other goods, like fish or guano from the islands. Guano is essentially bird poop, which happens to be a very good organic fertilizer and Peru is the world’s leading producer of it. It was prized by the Incas and played a very important role in the Peruvian economy in the 19th century until they overexploited stocks. The building of the pier began the golden age of Pacasmayo, which lasted until 1967, the year when the railway stopped running. Since that time, the commercial activity has decreased to the point where now the pier, just as the railway station, are historic monuments, the evidence of a glorious past that brought with it an economic boom to the city. The initial length of the deck was 773 metres, but 3 bigger swells during the early 1900s and one in 2015 (when even Laird Hamilton visited Pacasmayo for the swell) destroyed a big part of it. Nowadays there is just 424 metres left, but it still looks such a long pier! Now it is so fragile that only fishermen are allowed to walk over the deck to get to their boats. The bigger the swell is, the farther out they need to anchor their boats. The local fishing fleet means great fresh fish in Pacasmayo, best sampled in the famous Peruvian fish dish, Ceviche.
