Peru Travel Guide: Unique Community Hosts Unique Festival

The Selvámonos music and arts festival in Oxapampa, Peru

The jungle is a popular destination for many Peru vacations, with jungle lodges and Amazon River cruises offering an easy introduction to the wild Amazon rainforest, its unique ecosystems and its vast range of wildlife inhabitants.

But the central jungle region is a little-known and under-visited region of the rainforest and is an ideal place for travelers looking for their own Amazon adventures.

Within this region is a unique community of Germanic settlers who made an epic migration from Central Europe to Peru in the 1850s and eventually established a number of settlements in the selva alta, the high jungle, where the Andes mountains and the Amazon meet.

In the towns of Oxapampa and Pasco, the German heritage is alive and well to this day, with blond hair and blue eyes a common sight, and an old dialect of German still spoken.

This unique community is playing host to a unique new event in October, with the Selvámonos music and arts festival of Oxapampa due to begin on 10 October 2009.

The first of its kind, Selvámonos is aimed at bringing music and art together in the paradisiacal location of the selva alta. The concept is borrowed from successes in other countries, where music and arts have been decentralized from the major cities and allowed to flourish in diverse, alternative environments.

The event will be featuring a variety of national and international artists, including Jean Pierre Magnet, a well known composer and saxophonist who is inspired by the musical traditions of the Andes, along with Andres Prado, a jazz guitarist also heavily influenced by the various Peruvian styles.

The location for Selvámonos has been chosen to place emphasis on the positive elements of the region, as an example of sustainable living and development. The event is being staged at the Aníbal Ruffner Ranch, located in La Florida Avenue s/n Chontabamba, Oxapampa and the doors open at 2:00pm.

For further information see the event blog: http://selvamonos.blogspot.com/

Getting to the area is a relatively easy bus journey from Lima which takes around 8/9 hours. Timing your journey to arrive in daylight is highly recommended, as the views during the descent from the sierra into the jungle are stunning.