(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)
Highlights from this week’s write-up:
“I really thought I might die from altitude sickness during that 10-hour train trip.”
An American pet that’s a common a cuisine here
A leaf-eating bird, “sort of like an avian cow”
An ancient city laid out to look like an animal from the sky
Huge, precisely cut boulders stacked on top of each other by … aliens? Or maybe just giants.
Amazing! I would love the book. I loved the write-up last week, and my submission paled in comparison to some of the others! Also, I so appreciate Andrew’s perspective and have enjoyed following his career.
On to this week’s view, Chini circles the right window — along with several buildings:
Our super-sleuth in Riverwoods has a “last-minute WAG” for Zadar, Croatia. But our super-sleuth in Alexandria correctly looks to South America:
I am guessing this VFYW is from Guatavita, Colombia. I can’t get any closer than that, due to laziness. We lived in Paraguay, and the red tiled roofs over white houses looked similar for sure … but it’s a near miss for our town, since we didn’t have mountains in Pilar, Paraguay. So I googled “red tiled roofs over mountains” and got Guatavita. It looks like a beautiful area! Hope to visit someday.
From our super-sleuth in Durham, UK:
The room sign tells me we’re in a Spanish-speaking country:
So my first thought was Spain/Portugal or South America, with the built-up hillsides somewhat favouring the latter.
Here’s the VFYW chef:
Daughter no. 2 and her husband recognized the rooftops of [city redacted] right away, because they went there for a friend’s wedding a few years ago. They sent me this photo from the restaurant Local:
You can see the identical ridge with radio towers in the background. If I had followed this lead, I would have gotten there right away, because the hotel is just around the corner. Instead I spent ages looking for those espadañas, the pierced gables with bells. This turned out to be difficult because they don’t belong to a church anymore.
Naming the right country is our super-sleuth in Berkeley:
So I started looking for images of urban Peruvian hilltops with antenna farms, but Google kept trying to shoehorn me into Lima (which didn’t look remotely right), so I finally had to insist on the Boolean equivalent of “Not Lima, Goddammit!” After that Google, settled down and squeezed out a few images that looked enough like our view’s antenna-covered hill to give me my eureka moment.
After that it was just a matter of looking at enough [city redacted] church bells to finally recognize the campanarios in our view as a rear view of the ones at the Chapel of Saint Anthony the Abbot in the Plazoleta de Nazarenas. (I only needed to see about a dozen different images of it before something finally clicked. Somehow the ones in our photo didn’t look fancy enough.)
Another clue — the hillside filled with towers and antennae — is identified by our super-sleuth in Roberts Creek:
I’m disappointment that I ran out of time this week, but I was up at my cabin in the BCinterior with limited internet access. I did find the city and the approximate view point, but there were so many tiled roofs in the area it was a struggle to find the window. I have not been to [city redacted] yet, but I’ve stayed in Lima and Arequipa on business trips. Here’s a view from the Cruza Loma hill looking back towards the town center:
A previous winner reveals the right city:
It really could be anywhere in the Andes — looks like a Spanish colonial city. My guess is Cusco, near the Plaza Mayor.
Don’t really have any good stories. Just an incredible place, including the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu.
The most interesting clue this week is highlighted by the “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Oklahoma City:
San Mateo explains:
Rather than a comprehensive Reimagined treatment this week, we’ll focus on a small but intriguing feature of the view: a ceramic figurine depicting two seated animal figures — bulls — flanked by small clay pots, topped by a weathervane-like structure with decorative shapes and a yellow pennant. They’re shown in the red circle:
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