6.4263°S, 77.9271°W.
Kuelap is a Chachapoya fortified citadel on a limestone ridge at 3,000 metres elevation in the Amazonas region of northern Peru, built between roughly 500 and 1500 CE. The site is enclosed by a perimeter wall up to 19 metres high and 600 metres long, made of cut limestone blocks rising in coursed batter and pierced by only three narrow funnel-shaped entrances designed to admit one person at a time. Within the wall are more than 400 circular stone buildings on terraced platforms, decorated with friezes of zig-zag and rhomboid patterns. Adolph Bandelier visited and reported the site in the late 19th century; systematic excavation by Federico Kauffmann Doig and later Alfredo Narvaez has documented occupation phases through Inca conquest around 1470. A cable car system installed in 2017 reduced the access time from a multi-hour climb to twenty minutes.
The defensive walls still rise sheer and unbreached above the cloud forest below.