This art form includes straw hats and baskets woven from native reed species such as carrizo, junco and totora.
Baskets and hats are produced mainly in the departments of San Martín, Piura and Cajamarca, while totora reed is largely used in La Libertad and Lambayeque to make the reed rafts called caballitos de totora, vessels used for thousands of years by fishermen in the seaside community of Huanchaco, near Trujillo.
In earlier times, baskets were woven for utilitarian uses, but now many villages rely almost exclusively on the baskets they produce for tourists, producing them of superior quality and incorporating imaginative patterns and designs.
