Young towns

This past Friday was a holiday here in Peru, so we went with Daniel to his aunt's house in a district on the edge of Lima. While her district was very beautiful with large houses and YARDS, we passed through some pueblos jóvenes along the way. Pueblos jóvenes, or young towns, are newly settled towns in the province of Lima. 


Young towns are created when people from the sierra (high lands) emigrate to Lima. They find land and set up a hut, more or less, in the desert. There they live with others who emigrated, without electricity or running water. Their life is very difficult! After some years (5-10), the city will decide to provide these utilities to the community and install electrical poles and running water to the town.

 You can see a new town in the distance - newly settled.

Somewhere along the way, the people of the town begin to settle even more, replacing their straw or wooden houses with bricks. My understanding is that they use their money to buy bricks - once there are enough bricks to build a wall, they put up one wall. This continues until there are enough bricks for an entire house. They then will start on the second floor.

A very new town. You can see the walls are still wooden on many of these houses.

A new town with a closer view. Many of these buildings are brick already!

In this way, you can generally tell how old a part of town in by looking at the height of the buildings and how completed they are. Once a level is completed, they also cover it with a type of concrete and paint the house. Here in Callao, you can definitely see this represented in the houses! 

This is a normal site here in Callao. You can see the first floor is completed and painted on the center building. The second floor is still brick, without the concrete and paint over the top. The building on the far left has concrete but no paint yet!

I found this incredibly interesting! Daniel told us that the population of Lima is very hard to determine because people are constantly moving into pueblos jóvenes. Each day, the population is changing. I know this is typical of any city, but in the US it takes a very different form.