A traveler we met at one of the places we stayed said, "Piura is a trully dangerous place."
I responded, "Do you mean 'dangerous' as in you never want to leave... or really dangerous." "Really dangerous," was his reply. "All the restaurants have guys with guns hanging out outside."

Piura is nowhere near as exciting as all that. In fact, the scariest thing we saw there was not one but TWO purple Barney dinosaurs walking down the street armed with a bunch of multicolored yo-yos.

We didn't spend much time in Piura, however we did take a nice walk through the Plaza de Armes in the evening.