The women were well-dressed and modest, covering their whole bodies by wearing a petticoat beneath a fringed cloak with sleeves. One of the women was "as white as a Castillian lady except that she had her chin painted like a Moorish woman." Coronado commented that they "tattoo their bodies and faces, and are large people of very fine appearance."
"Inca chronicles and legends persist that the Cloud People were tall fair (skin and hair) warriors. This is reinforced by an unusually large proportion of blond, fair natives in this zone who know of no European ancestry. However Julio C. Tello and anthropologists speculate the Chachapoyans may have been a jungle culture that migrated there through the Magdalena Valley of Columbia, and preferred the mountaintops. Whatever case, the Cloud People don’t fit the pattern of other Andeans. They lived behind walls in well crafted stone round houses with a pointed thatch “tepee” roof. One would suspect they farmed better land below the cloud forest, which wasn’t leached out and eroded, but lived on the peaks.