For at least 3,500 years, fishermen along the Peruvian coast have been making reed-bound boats and surfing the waves back to shore. Three-metre-high waves crash onto Playa El Mogote in the northern Peruvian seaside village of Huanchaco. Gazing out into the beach, a mix of locals and international tourists surf in the Pacific, but around a curve in the coastline, the arched prows of caballitos de totora line the beach, their bows pointing towards the ocean.
For at least the past 3,500 years, Huanchaco's fishermen have been using these reed crafts to surf. Known as tup in Mochica, one of Peru's extinct Indigenous languages, or caballitos ("little horses") in Spanish, these ancient crafts are made with tightly tied bundles of totora reeds that grow in freshwater ponds near the coast. Their signature upturned, narrow bow both slices through and pops up over the waves.
The Pacific is anything but peaceful here, and in recent years its epic swells have been drawing modern surfers from around the world. But for those who have lived on this coast for thousands of years, caballitos were the only thing that could punch through the waves to help them reach their fishing areas before letting them surf their way back to the beach. Huanchaceños who still make caballitos are proud of their crafts, which some have claimed are one of the world's earliest surfboards , though every year fewer people here are learning the art of cultivating totora and constructing caballitos.
Now, this ancient.