PeruPerú

Caral, in the Supe valley north of Lima, was a city of pyramids and sunken plazas about 5,000 years ago, roughly as old as the earliest cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Its people had no pottery, but they farmed cotton and traded with fishing villages on the coast.

Chavín de Huántar, in the Andes around 900–200 BCE, spread a religious style of fanged gods and underground galleries across much of Peru. On the south coast the Paracas culture wove textiles still admired today, and its successors, the Nazca, drew giant lines and figures across the desert.

On the north coast, the Moche (about 100–800 CE) built adobe pyramids and made portrait pottery of startling realism; the tomb of the Lord of Sipán, found intact in 1987, showed their wealth. The Wari of the central Andes built the first highland empire, with roads and administrative centres that the Inca later copied.

The Chimú kingdom ruled the north coast from its capital Chan Chan, the largest adobe city in the Americas, until the Inca conquered it in the 1470s. Around Lake Titicaca, Tiwanaku, now in Bolivia, shaped Andean religion for centuries.

The Inca were a small kingdom around Cusco until Pachacuti defeated the Chanka around 1438 and began the expansion that created Tawantinsuyu, 'the four parts together'. Within a century it stretched from southern Colombia to central Chile, joined by some 40,000 km of roads, runners who carried messages and storehouses for food and cloth.

The empire ran without money or writing as Europeans knew it. Labour was owed to the state (mit'a), records were kept on knotted cords (quipu), and Quechua became the language of administration. Cusco was rebuilt as a sacred capital, with the gold-lined Qorikancha temple at its centre.

Francisco Pizarro landed with fewer than 200 men in 1532, into an empire weakened by smallpox and civil war. At Cajamarca he seized Atahualpa, collected a room of gold as ransom, and executed him anyway. Manco Inca's rebellion of 1536 nearly retook Cusco; a neo-Inca state held out in Vilcabamba until 1572.

Pizarro founded Lima in 1535 as the 'City of Kings', and it became the capital of a viceroyalty covering most of Spanish South America. Silver from Potosí flowed through it. Churches rose on Inca foundations in Cusco, which is why walls of fitted Inca stone carry colonial balconies.

Peru declared independence on 28 July 1821, but the Spanish army was only defeated at Ayacucho in 1824. The republic lost its southern nitrate provinces to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879–84), a defeat still remembered in Lima.

About a quarter of Peruvians speak Quechua or Aymara, mostly in the southern Andes, and many more have Andean parents who moved to Lima. Migration since the 1950s turned the capital's desert edges into vast self-built districts, and Andean music, food and festivals came with it.

The Shining Path insurgency (1980–2000) and the state's response killed about 70,000 people, most of them Quechua-speaking villagers; the truth commission's report of 2003 is still debated. Alberto Fujimori defeated the insurgency, closed Congress in 1992 and was later jailed for abuses.

Since 2016 Peru has had a rapid turnover of presidents, removed by Congress or forced out. The removal of Pedro Castillo in December 2022 led to protests in which dozens died, mostly in the south. Elections in 2026 produced a new government in July; road blockades and crime emergencies remain part of the travel picture.

Peruvian cooking layers four worlds. The Andes gave potatoes (thousands of varieties), corn, quinoa and chillies; the Pacific, cold and rich thanks to the Humboldt Current, gave fish; Spain brought beef, onions and citrus; and enslaved Africans, Chinese labourers and Japanese migrants each added their own techniques.

Ceviche, raw fish cured in lime with chilli and onion, is the national dish, eaten at lunch in cevicherías. Chinese migrants created chifa, whose stir-fry gave rise to lomo saltado; Japanese-Peruvians developed Nikkei cooking and changed how ceviche is cut and served.

From the 1990s chefs such as Gastón Acurio made Peruvian food a national project, training cooks and promoting producers. Lima's restaurants now rank among the world's best, and the Mistura food fair drew huge crowds.

Outside Lima, Arequipa's picanterías serve spicy stews, Cusco roasts guinea pig for festivals, and the Amazon wraps rice in leaves as juane. Pisco, a grape brandy made on the south coast, is claimed by both Peru and Chile.

Peru has one of the driest coasts on earth: the cold Humboldt Current cools the air, so rain almost never falls, and cities like Lima sit on desert watered by rivers from the Andes. The same cold water feeds one of the world's richest fisheries and colonies of sea lions and penguins at Paracas.

The Andes rise to 6,768 m at Huascarán. Between the ranges lie high plains (the altiplano around Titicaca), deep canyons such as Colca and Cotahuasi, and valleys where the Inca built terraces for crops at different altitudes.

East of the mountains, cloud forest drops into the Amazon, which covers about 60% of the country. Manu and Tambopata protect some of the most species-rich forest on the planet, while illegal gold mining in Madre de Dios poisons rivers with mercury.

Every few years El Niño reverses the coast's weather, bringing floods to the northern desert and warm water that drives fish away. Glacier loss in the Cordillera Blanca threatens water for coastal cities in the dry season.

Machu Picchu was built in the mid-15th century as a royal estate, probably for Pachacuti, on a ridge above the Urubamba at about 2,430 m. It housed perhaps 750 people, including temple servants, and was abandoned within a century, apparently never found by the Spanish.

Local farmers knew the site, and it was never lost to them. Hiram Bingham, guided by Melchor Arteaga, reached it in 1911 and publicised it; Yale took thousands of artefacts, most returned to Cusco between 2011 and 2012.

UNESCO listed it in 1983. To manage erosion and crowds, Peru now sells named, timed tickets for a fixed circuit and route, with about 4,500 places a day (more in high season), no re-entry and no changes. In 2026 sales moved to a direct-purchase system on the Ministry of Culture site — check the current rules before booking.

Most visitors arrive by train to Aguas Calientes and a bus up the switchbacks; trekkers come by the Inca Trail (closed every February) or longer routes such as Salkantay. Disputes over the bus concession and local protests have interrupted access at times, so a spare day is wise.