Peru

Peru is the cradle of Andean civilisation. Caral, on the coast, was a city 4,600 years ago, followed by the Chavín, the Nazca who scored their vast lines into the desert, the Moche and Chimú of the north coast, and the Wari, before the Inca built the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas from Cusco in barely a century, bound together by a road network that ran the length of the Andes. Francisco Pizarro's small Spanish force toppled it in 1532, helped by an Inca civil war, epidemic disease, and native allies.

Peru became the core of Spanish South America — the Viceroyalty of Peru, with Lima its capital and the silver of Potosí passing through it — and the setting for the largest Indigenous uprising of the colonial era, under Túpac Amaru II in 1780. Independence, declared in 1821, was only secured in 1824 at Junín and Ayacucho, Peru being among the last redoubts of Spanish power. The nineteenth century brought instability, a guano boom, and the loss of the War of the Pacific (1879–83) to Chile, which occupied Lima.

After democracy returned in 1980, an internal conflict against the Maoist Shining Path and the smaller MRTA killed some 69,000 people, most of them Quechua-speaking rural poor. Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) beat hyperinflation and defeated the Shining Path but ruled through a "self-coup", death squads, and the forced sterilisation of hundreds of thousands of mostly Indigenous women before a corruption scandal ended his rule. In the quarter-century since, almost every elected president has been jailed or prosecuted for corruption; Pedro Castillo was arrested in 2022 after trying to dissolve Congress, and the deadly protests under his successor Dina Boluarte have left a human-rights crisis, with elections due in 2026.

Peruvian identity is a layering of Andean, Spanish, African, and Asian worlds. Quechua and Aymara are living languages, and highland communities keep the ayllu kin group, reciprocal labour, offerings to the mountain spirits and Pachamama, and festivals that fuse Catholic saints with pre-Hispanic rite — Inti Raymi in Cusco, the Virgen de la Candelaria in Puno, Qoyllur Rit'i on a glacier near Ausangate. Andean weaving is a high art, each region with its own patterns.

The coast has its own culture — criollo music of vals and marinera, and the guitar-and-cajón Afro-Peruvian tradition revived by singers such as Susana Baca — and Lima's identity as a cosmopolitan food capital. Chinese and Japanese immigration gave Peru chifa and nikkei cooking and, once, a Japanese-Peruvian president.

Football is the national passion, and the long gaps between World Cup appearances are a recurring national melodrama.

About a third of Peruvians live in Greater Lima, a vast desert city that grew through decades of migration from the Andes and now spreads for miles up the dry hills in informal districts. The coast holds most of the rest of the population and the modern economy — irrigated agro-export farms, fishing ports, and mining logistics. The Andean highlands are the Indigenous heartland, poorer and emptying as young people leave for the cities, though Cusco lives well off tourism. The Amazon, more than half the national territory, has only a twentieth of the people.

Peru has been a macroeconomic success by regional standards for two decades, on copper, gold, fishmeal, gas, and farm exports, yet most workers are informal, public services are thin, and conflict over mining — and, in the Amazon, illegal gold and logging — is constant.

Politics is in permanent crisis: a discredited Congress, a president few support, and a rotating cast of leaders under investigation.

Peruvian cuisine has become one of the most celebrated in the world, drawing on an extraordinary range of ingredients — thousands of potato varieties, maize, quinoa, ají chillies, Pacific seafood, Amazonian fruits — and on Spanish, African, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian influence. Ceviche, raw fish "cooked" in lime with onion and chilli and served with sweet potato and corn, is the national dish.

Lomo saltado and arroz chaufa come from the chifa Chinese-Peruvian kitchen, and tiradito is the nikkei Japanese-Peruvian cousin of ceviche. The Andes give pachamanca baked in an earth oven, roasted cuy (guinea pig), rocoto relleno, and hearty soups; the Amazon gives juane and river fish such as paiche. Anticuchos — grilled beef-heart skewers — and causa are everyday favourites.

To drink there is pisco, the grape brandy at the centre of a rivalry with Chile, in the pisco sour; purple-corn chicha morada; Inca Kola, the fluorescent yellow soft drink that outsells Coca-Cola; and coca tea for the altitude.

Machu Picchu, the Inca citadel on a saddle high above the Urubamba, is the icon — reached by train from Cusco and Ollantaytambo, or on foot via the four-day Inca Trail or the Salkantay route. Cusco, the Inca capital rebuilt in stone and baroque, is the base, with the Sacred Valley below — Pisac, Ollantaytambo, Maras and Moray — and the rainbow-striped Vinicunca mountain nearby.

Lake Titicaca from Puno has the reed islands of the Uros and the weaving communities of Amantaní and Taquile. Arequipa, a city of white volcanic stone below El Misti, is the gateway to the Colca Canyon, one of the world's deepest, where Andean condors ride the morning thermals. The southern desert holds the Nazca Lines, the Paracas peninsula and Ballestas islands, and the Huacachina oasis.

The north has the Cordillera Blanca and the trekking capital Huaraz, the adobe city of Chan Chan and the Moche pyramids near Trujillo, and the cloud-forest fortress of Kuélap. Lima itself has a rich museum scene, a preserved colonial centre, and the bluff-top districts of Miraflores and Barranco, and the Amazon opens from Puerto Maldonado into Tambopata and Manú, or from Iquitos into Pacaya-Samiria.