Where the road out of the cold Andes finally runs out of mountain: two rivers meet, the air turns warm and green, and the jungle begins.
For centuries this valley was Asháninka country — they are the largest Indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon — and in 1742 they drove the Spanish missionaries and settlers out of it altogether. The army came back in 1847 and raised a fort where the Tarma and Tulumayo rivers meet, naming it for the president of the day, Ramón Castilla. Coffee, citrus and thousands of Andean migrants followed. Today about 22,500 people (2017) live at 820 metres in a hot green gorge that Peru calls the golden gate to the central jungle.
The drive is half the point. You leave Tarma — a highland town of cut flowers and thin, cold air at 3,048 metres — and the road starts to fall. In about sixty kilometres it gives up more than two thousand metres. Eucalyptus turns to tree ferns and banana leaf, cloud snags on the ridges, and by the time the road flattens out you are sweating. Peruvians have a name for this narrow belt where the mountains break into rainforest: the ceja de selva, the eyebrow of the jungle. San Ramón sits right on it, at the point where the Tarma and the Tulumayo run together and become the milky-brown Chanchamayo.
The fort of 1847 was not the first attempt on this valley. Franciscan friars had pushed in from 1635, and in 1742 a leader called Juan Santos Atahualpa, backed by Asháninka and Yánesha fighters, threw every missionary and settler out, and kept them out for generations. What returned with the soldiers stayed: laws written from 1849 to hand jungle land to newcomers, and families arriving from Italy, China and Chile. From about 1850 they planted coffee here alongside sugar cane and tobacco, while the Asháninka were pushed east toward the Ene and Tambo rivers. Coffee then made the valley's name — in the 1950s a boom pulled thousands of Andean families down that same road, and Chanchamayo is still a word Peruvians look for on a bag of beans.
What is left is a hot, cheerful, slightly scruffy town of green steel bridges and buzzing three-wheeled mototaxis, seven or eight hours from Lima, which is why the weekend buses fill up. People come for water. The Catarata El Tirol drops 35 metres into a pool a short walk east of town; the Tulumayo carries class IV rapids; the river pools cost nothing. Farms in the hills walk visitors between the coffee bushes and the orange trees. And from one strip of asphalt at the edge of town, light aircraft still lift over the ridge — as they have since 1927, when a young lieutenant flew an open-cockpit biplane here from Lima in two hours and forty minutes and opened the valley to the air.
The making of San Ramón
Where the rivers meet
The Tarma and the Tulumayo join at the edge of town, 820 metres above the sea, and leave as the Chanchamayo — the reason a fort, and then a town, stands here.
Catarata El Tirol
A 35-metre fall in three steps, a few kilometres east of town and under an hour's walk through the forest — San Ramón's own waterfall.
Chanchamayo coffee
Planted here by incoming settlers from about 1850 and booming in the 1950s; the valley's name is still one of the ones Peruvians read on a bag of beans.
The Asháninka
The largest Indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon, whose land this valley is — speakers of an Arawak language, and in 1742 strong enough to expel every colonist from the valley.
Ramón Castilla
The president in office in 1847, when soldiers raised a fort at the river junction and named it for him. The fort is gone; the name became the town.
Pampa Hermosa National Sanctuary
Cloud forest reached by 23 km of dirt road from San Ramón, protecting Peru's high-altitude cedars — one of them, called La Abuela, is reckoned to be over 600 years old.
The San Ramón airstrip
Named for Leonardo Alvariño Herr, who in 1927 flew an open-cockpit biplane from Lima across the Andes at 5,080 metres and landed here in two hours and forty minutes.
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