One street in Huaraz looks the way the whole city once did. Jirón José Olaya is the only block that survived the earthquakes that leveled the rest of Huaraz, and walking it now is walking through a version of the town that stopped existing in 1970. Whitewashed walls, balconies, narrow doorways. On Sundays a street market fills it with regional food - women ladling picante de cuy from clay pots, the smell of anticuchos, the sound of Quechua rising above the Spanish. It is a preserved grain of old Huaraz around which the new city was rebuilt, utilitarian and low, still getting used to itself.

The Wari ruins of Wilcahuaín sit close enough to Huaraz that you can hike there as an acclimatization walk. The site dates to roughly 600 to 900 AD, long before the Inca, and the temple complex is nearly intact - a rare chance to see a complete pre-Columbian building in Peru. The Quechua name means grandson's house. The original builders filled it with mummies, preserved by a ventilation system that kept the dry mountain air moving through the chambers. The temple is an imitation of the great ceremonial center at Chavín de Huántar - itself a long tour south of town, and the hub of a cultural revolution that remade the Andes between 600 and 300 BCE. The Museo Regional de Ancash in town holds the largest collection of ancient stone sculptures in South America, including trepanned skulls and Recuay culture monoliths.

Huaraz exists to serve the Cordillera Blanca. The Santa Cruz Trek, four days through alpine valleys and glacial lakes, is among the great walks in the Andes. Laguna 69 - a single lake so blue it looks filtered - sits at the end of a steep day hike from the Llanganuco valley. Laguna Parón, the largest lake in the range, spreads out below Huandoy and Chacraraju. Huascarán itself, Peru's highest peak at 6,768 meters, rises northeast of town; the climb is serious mountaineering that begins with a combi ride to the village of Musho and a four-hour walk to the refugio. Casa de Guías in town is where serious trekkers sign in and out, and where strangers find partners for routes they cannot do alone.

Twenty-three kilometers northeast of Huaraz, at 4,566 meters below Palcaraju and Pucaranra, sits Lake Palcacocha. On December 13, 1941, a huge piece of the glacier above it fell into the lake and broke the moraine wall holding the water. Within fifteen minutes a mudslide of ice, rock, and liquid mud reached the town. It killed somewhere between 1,800 and 7,000 people. Huaraz has never forgotten. The lake has now grown 34 times larger than it was in 1970, fed by accelerating glacial melt, and a local farmer named Saúl Luciano Lliuya filed suit against the German utility RWE for its share of responsibility - a case that in 2017 established a historic legal precedent that private companies can be held partly liable for climate damages. The mountain gives Huaraz its beauty. It has also threatened to bury the city twice.

The Mercado Central is where Huaraz eats. The second floor serves a complete Peruvian set meal - soup, rice, chicken, lemonade - for S/2.50, a price that feels almost suspicious. Trekkers on the first floor stock up on dried fruit, nuts, and coca leaves. Cuy, or guinea pig, is the regional specialty, though many visitors find once is enough. The thermal baths at Monterrey are a short combi ride north of town, with views of Huascarán from the pool. For something stranger, Hatun Machay is a stone forest south of the city where climbers sleep in a refugio among boulders that look like frozen waves. Huaraz is not beautiful in the way Cusco is beautiful. It is beautiful the way a basecamp is beautiful - functional, tired, and pointed at something enormous just over the ridge.