Peru is one of the few regions in the world where civilization arose on its own, without the influence of any earlier center. In the coastal valleys of Supe, Pativilca and Fortaleza, north of Lima, the Caral-Supe —or Norte Chico— culture raised around 3000-2600 BC the sacred city of Caral, considered the oldest in the Americas and contemporary with the first cities of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. Its seven monumental pyramids, its sunken circular plazas, its amphitheaters and its temple of the fire altar reveal a state society, hierarchical and planned, fifteen hundred years before the Olmecs of Mesoamerica.
What is remarkable about Caral is that it flourished without ceramics or metallurgy, sustained by an economy of cotton farming and fishing traded between the coast and the interior. Quipus —knotted cords for recording information— were found there some four thousand years earlier than the Incas, as well as flutes made from condor and pelican bone. The researcher Ruth Shady, who has been excavating it since 1994, defined it as the 'mother civilization' of the Andes. Caral was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2009.
On that millennia-old root everything that came afterwards was built. The techniques for managing water in the desert, the organization of collective labor and the centrality of the religious that characterize Caral reappear, transformed, in every one of the later Andean cultures, right down to the Tahuantinsuyo itself.
After Caral, the Andes lived through a long parade of cultures that perfected art, engineering and religion. Around 1200 BC, in the highlands of Áncash, Chavín de Huántar became the first great pan-Andean ceremonial center: its cult, presided over by feline deities carved on the Lanzón and on the tenon heads, radiated a shared iconography across much of ancient Peru during what is called the Early Horizon. Chavín is today a World Heritage Site.
On the south coast, the Paracas culture (8th century BC - 2nd century AD) left the finest funerary mantles of the ancient world and practiced complex cranial trepanations. Their heirs, the Nazca (100 BC - 800 AD), traced on the pampa the famous Nazca Lines —enormous geoglyphs of animals and figures visible only from the air— and dug underground aqueducts, the puquios, which still work. On the north coast, the Moche or Mochica (1st-8th centuries) reached an artistic peak with their portrait ceramics and their goldwork: the Royal Tombs of the Lord of Sipán, found intact in 1987, are compared to the discovery of Tutankhamun.
These societies did not know writing as we understand it, but they left an extraordinary visual and technical record. Their command of irrigation, of textiles and of metal prepared the ground for the great expansive states that would come afterwards, the Wari and the Incas.
Between the 6th and 11th centuries, while the regional cultures were declining, two great powers reorganized the Andean world. From the Titicaca altiplano, Tiwanaku spread its religious and commercial influence to the south, with its Gateway of the Sun and its cult of the staff god. And from Ayacucho, in the central highlands, the Wari empire (c. 600-1100 AD) built the first great expansive state of the Andes: planned cities, a road network, administrative storehouses and a system of colonies that, centuries later, the Incas would inherit and perfect. Enclaves such as Cerro Baúl, in Moquegua, show the encounter —at times tense, at times peaceful— between Wari and Tiwanaku.
After the collapse of Wari, around the year 1000, the regional lordships re-emerged during what is called the Late Intermediate Period. On the north coast, the Chimú or Chimor kingdom built Chan Chan, the largest mud-brick city in all the Americas, capital of a state that dominated some thousand kilometers of coastline from the year 900. Its craftsmen were master goldsmiths, and its power gave way only when the Incas, around 1470, conquered it and moved its finest artisans to Cusco.
In the altiplano and the southern highlands the Aymara kingdoms —Collas and Lupacas— flourished at the same time, along with other lordships such as the Chachapoyas of the northeast or the Chancas of Ayacucho, all of which would be absorbed, one after another, by the dizzying Inca expansion of the 15th century.
At the beginning of the 15th century, Cusco was barely one more among the many lordships of the southern highlands. Everything changed around 1438, when the young prince Cusi Yupanqui defeated the fearsome Chanca confederation that was threatening the city and, after his victory, had himself crowned with the name Pachacútec, 'he who transforms the world'. Under his impetus and that of his successors Túpac Yupanqui and Huayna Cápac, the small kingdom became in less than a century the Tahuantinsuyo, 'the four regions united', the most extensive empire in pre-Hispanic America.
At its height, the Tahuantinsuyo covered close to two million square kilometers, from southern Colombia to central Chile and northwestern Argentina, linked by the Qhapaq Ñan, a road network of more than thirty thousand kilometers with tambos, storehouses and hanging bridges. The state organized labor through the mita —rotating shifts in the service of the empire— and reciprocity (the ayni); it imposed Quechua as the general language; and it upheld a solar religion centered on Inti, on the Sapa Inca as his son, and on the cult of the Pachamama.
Cusco, rebuilt by Pachacútec on the plan of a puma, was the 'navel of the world': there stood the Coricancha, the temple of the Sun covered with sheets of gold. Citadels such as Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo, Písac or Sacsayhuamán show a stone engineering that still astonishes today. But on the death of Huayna Cápac, around 1527 —probably from a smallpox epidemic that had arrived from the Caribbean—, a civil war broke out between his sons Huáscar and Atahualpa that split the empire just as the Spanish were appearing.
In 1532, Francisco Pizarro climbed the Andes from the north coast with fewer than two hundred men and sixty-two horses, in search of the Inca. On November 16, in the square of Cajamarca, he laid an ambush for Atahualpa: in barely half an hour, the Spanish cavalry and artillery massacred his unarmed retinue and captured the sovereign. A prisoner, Atahualpa offered to fill one room with gold and two with silver in exchange for his freedom —the 'Ransom Room', the greatest booty in history—; but once they had collected it, the Spanish executed him in July 1533, accusing him of conspiracy.
Taking advantage of the civil war and of alliances with peoples fed up with Cusco rule, the Spanish took Cusco that same year and enthroned puppet Incas. The conquest, however, was not instantaneous. Manco Inca, an ally at first, rebelled in 1536 and laid siege to Cusco and Lima; defeated, he founded in the jungle the neo-Inca state of Vilcabamba, which held out until 1572, when viceroy Francisco de Toledo had the last sovereign, Túpac Amaru I, captured and beheaded in the main square of Cusco.
Meanwhile, the conquistadors were tearing each other apart. The civil wars between the followers of Pizarro and those of Almagro, over the sharing out of the immense booty, dragged on from 1537 to 1554 and cost the lives of almost all their protagonists: Diego de Almagro was executed in 1538, and Francisco Pizarro himself was murdered in his palace in Lima in 1541. The European epidemics —smallpox, measles, typhus—, against which the native population had no defenses, killed millions and completed the collapse of a millennia-old world.
Peru was the jewel of the Spanish crown in South America. Lima, founded by Pizarro on January 18, 1535 as the 'City of Kings', became the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, the richest and most powerful of the empire, which at its height took in almost all of Spanish South America. The engine of that wealth was silver: the Cerro Rico of Potosí —then part of the viceroyalty, today in Bolivia— was the most productive mine in the world and came to supply, together with Zacatecas, most of the silver circulating on the planet, financing European wars and trade with Asia.
That colonial apparatus was organized by viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569-1581), the true architect of the system. Toledo gathered the Indigenous population into 'reducciones', regularized tribute, institutionalized the mining mita —which sent thousands of Indigenous people in shifts to die in the tunnels of Potosí and in the mercury mine of Huancavelica, indispensable for refining silver— and installed the Tribunal of the Inquisition in Lima in 1570. The resulting society was rigidly hierarchical and divided into estates, with a peninsular and Creole elite at the top, and a base of tribute-paying Indigenous people and enslaved Africans brought to the coast.
Lima flourished as a viceregal court: its University of San Marcos, founded in 1551, is the oldest in the Americas; its baroque churches, its carved balconies and its Plaza Mayor make up a historic center that is today a World Heritage Site. In Cusco, in Ayacucho or in Arequipa, mestizo art fused the Andean and the Hispanic in schools of painting, in altarpieces and in an unmistakable architecture. Beneath that opulent façade, however, there beat a social tension that would erupt with force in the 18th century.
The 18th century brought the Bourbon reforms: the Spanish crown, seeking to squeeze more resources out of its colonies, raised taxes, created new customs houses, tightened the forced distribution of merchandise (the repartimiento) and split off from the Peruvian viceroyalty the territories of the Río de la Plata (1776), reducing its former splendor. The pressure on the Andean communities, already weighed down by the mita and by the abuses of the corregidores, became unbearable.
In November 1780 the greatest insurrection in all of colonial America broke out. José Gabriel Condorcanqui, cacique of Tinta and a descendant of the Incas, took the name Túpac Amaru II and rose up in arms after executing the corregidor Antonio de Arriaga. His rebellion, which demanded the abolition of the mita, of the repartos and of the corregimientos —and went so far as to decree freedom for the enslaved—, mobilized tens of thousands of Indigenous people and mestizos across the southern Andes. At his side, his wife Micaela Bastidas was the strategist, organizer and logistics chief of the movement.
After besieging Cusco without success, Túpac Amaru was betrayed, captured and taken to the city, where on May 18, 1781 he was forced to watch the execution of his family —Micaela included— before being quartered in the square. The repression was atrocious, but the insurrection went on in the south and in the altiplano with Diego Cristóbal Túpac Amaru and with Túpac Katari, until 1783. Though defeated, that great rebellion shook the foundations of the colonial order and remained as a decisive precedent for independence, which would arrive forty years later.
Peru, the heart of Spanish power and a royalist stronghold, was among the last territories to gain independence, and its emancipation came pushed from outside by the two great liberating currents of the continent. From the south, the Argentine José de San Martín, after crossing the Andes and liberating Chile, landed with his expedition at Paracas in September 1820 and, without major battles, proclaimed the Independence of Peru in Lima on July 28, 1821. He took office as Protector and convened the first Constituent Congress, but he did not manage to break the royalist army entrenched in the highlands.
Faced with the stalemate, San Martín met Simón Bolívar in Guayaquil in 1822 and, after the encounter, withdrew from the scene, leaving the culmination of the war to the Venezuelan Liberator. Bolívar and his lieutenant Antonio José de Sucre reorganized the United Liberating Army and carried the fight up into the Andean heights. On August 6, 1824, on the pampa of Junín, the patriot cavalry defeated the royalists in a battle fought almost entirely with lance and sabre, with hardly a rifle shot fired.
The feat was sealed on December 9, 1824 on the pampa of La Quinua, near Ayacucho: there Sucre definitively defeated the army of viceroy José de la Serna and signed the Capitulation of Ayacucho, which put an end to almost three centuries of Spanish rule in South America. Out of those years there also arose, in 1825, the Republic of Bolívar —today's Bolivia—, created on the old Upper Peru. The young Peruvian republic was born free, but indebted, divided and without a consolidated state.
The first decades of the republic were a whirlwind of instability. Military caudillos —Gamarra, Santa Cruz, Orbegoso, Salaverry— fought over power by way of the barracks coup, and between 1836 and 1839 marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz went so far as to unite Peru and Bolivia in the short-lived Peru-Bolivian Confederation, dissolved after Chilean intervention. In the middle of the chaos, however, an unexpected windfall arrived.
From the 1840s, the guano of the islands —the accumulated droppings of seabirds, the most coveted fertilizer in the world before chemical fertilizers— generated a colossal fortune. Under the government of Ramón Castilla, the state put its finances in order, abolished the Indigenous tribute and, by decree of December 3, 1854, slavery, compensating the owners with guano money. Thousands of Chinese workers (coolies) also arrived on the coast, hired under conditions close to slavery, and their descendants would mark Peruvian culture and cooking forever.
But that wealth, exploited through the consignment system in the hands of private merchants, was largely squandered on bureaucracy, debt and luxury consumption. The historian Jorge Basadre coined for this period the name 'fallacious prosperity': guano did not lay the foundations of solid development and, when it began to run out, it left the country indebted and fragile, just before the greatest catastrophe of its republican history.
The greatest tragedy of the 19th century was the War of the Pacific, which set Chile against the alliance of Peru and Bolivia over control of the immensely rich saltpeter deposits of the Atacama desert. The conflict broke out in 1879, when Chile occupied the Bolivian coast and then declared war on Peru, bound to Bolivia by a secret treaty of alliance. Naval power would be decisive, and there the most revered figure in Peruvian history emerged: admiral Miguel Grau, 'the Gentleman of the Seas', who in command of the monitor Huáscar kept the Chilean squadron in check for months until he fell heroically in the battle of Angamos, in October 1879.
With command of the sea lost, the war moved onto land. The Chilean armies advanced through the south, took Tarapacá and Arica —where Francisco Bolognesi died resisting until he had 'burned the last cartridge'— and in January 1881 occupied Lima after the battles of San Juan and Miraflores. Resistance went on for two more years in the highlands, led by Andrés Avelino Cáceres and his montoneras in the famous Campaign of La Breña, until exhaustion forced peace.
By the Treaty of Ancón (1883), Peru ceded the province of Tarapacá in perpetuity, and Tacna and Arica were left under Chilean administration, with a plebiscite that was never held. Tacna returned to the homeland only in 1929, while Arica remained definitively in Chile. The war left the country occupied, ruined and humiliated, and branded Peruvian memory and patriotism for generations.
After the postwar reconstruction, Peru entered the 20th century with the 'Aristocratic Republic', dominated by a civilista oligarchy tied to the export of sugar, cotton and minerals, and with the rubber boom in the Amazon, which enriched Iquitos but also brought atrocities against the Indigenous peoples of the Putumayo. Between 1919 and 1930, the 'Oncenio' of Augusto B. Leguía modernized the state and the cities, but in an authoritarian and debt-laden way.
The great phenomenon of the century was the irruption of the masses and of new ideologies. In 1924, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre founded APRA, an anti-imperialist and popular movement; and in 1928 José Carlos Mariátegui, the most influential Marxist thinker in Latin America, published his 'Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana' and founded the Socialist Party. The debate between the two defined a good part of Peruvian politics. From the middle of the century, millions of Andean peasants migrated to Lima and to the coast, transforming forever the demography, the social map and the culture of the country.
In 1968, a military coup brought general Juan Velasco Alvarado to power, and his 'Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces' drove radical reforms: a land reform that wound up the old hacienda system and handed the land to peasant cooperatives, the nationalization of oil and mining, and official status for Quechua. It was a nationalist and statist attempt to change the structures of the country which, despite its economic failure, marked a before and after in Peruvian society.
The most painful period of contemporary Peru opened in 1980. In that same year in which the country was recovering democracy, the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso, Shining Path, led by the Ayacucho schoolteacher Abimael Guzmán ('chairman Gonzalo'), began a people's war by burning ballot boxes in Chuschi. Shortly afterwards it was joined by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). The internal armed conflict that followed, with the brutality of the subversives and the harsh response of the security forces, left, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, some 69,280 fatal victims, the great majority of them Quechua-speaking peasants from Ayacucho and the southern highlands, the poorest and most forgotten in the country.
In the midst of the violence and of a devastating hyperinflation, in 1990 the engineer Alberto Fujimori was elected. His government applied a drastic economic adjustment ('the fujishock'), and in April 1992 he carried out a self-coup: he dissolved Congress, took over the judiciary and concentrated power. Months later, in September 1992, the capture of Abimael Guzmán in Lima by the GEIN intelligence unit dealt the decisive blow to Shining Path. Fujimori defeated the insurgency and stabilized the economy, and in 1998 he signed the definitive peace with Ecuador after the Cenepa conflict.
But his regime rested on corruption and on the control of the media through his adviser Vladimiro Montesinos, and it collapsed spectacularly in the year 2000, when the broadcast of the 'vladivideos' —filmed bribes— revealed the scheme and forced his flight to Japan. Fujimori would later be convicted of human rights violations and corruption. The country entered the 21st century with the difficult task of rebuilding its democracy and facing the wounds of two decades of violence.
The Peru of the new century showed two contrasting faces. On one side, a long cycle of economic growth —driven by mining, agro-exports and domestic consumption— cut poverty to less than half between 2004 and 2019 and consolidated a broad urban middle class. On the other, a chain of political crises and corruption scandals, made worse by the Lava Jato case, which splashed almost every former president of recent decades.
In cultural terms, Peru lived through an extraordinary renaissance. The 'gastronomic boom', led by chefs such as Gastón Acurio —founder of Astrid & Gastón in 1994—, turned Peruvian cooking into a worldwide phenomenon and a source of national pride: ceviche, nikkei and chifa food, the chili peppers and the thousands of potato varieties became ambassadors of the country, with Lima established as the gastronomic capital of Latin America. To this were added the prestige of Machu Picchu, chosen one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World in 2007, and the Nobel Prize in Literature for Mario Vargas Llosa in 2010.
Politics, by contrast, sank into chronic instability. The struggle between the executive and a hostile Congress led to a carousel of leaders: Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned in 2018; Martín Vizcarra dissolved Congress in 2019 and was removed from office in 2020; Pedro Castillo, elected in 2021, attempted a self-coup and was dismissed and arrested in December 2022, which brought Dina Boluarte —the first woman to preside over the country— to power amid protests that left dozens dead. In this century Peru has had more presidents than years of stability, a prosperous and creative country but trapped in an institutional fatigue that is still looking for a way out.
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In the cloud forest of the northeast, among mist-covered mountains, the Chachapoyas culture flourished —'the warriors of the clouds'—, a people of builders and farmers who ruled these wooded heights roughly between the 8th and 15th centuries. Its masterpiece is Kuélap, a colossal walled fortress on a mountain more than three thousand meters high, with walls of up to twenty meters and more than four hundred circular buildings inside.
Considered the 'Machu Picchu of the north', Kuélap is one of the largest stone structures of ancient Peru, today reachable by a modern cable car that drastically cut the travel time and opened the region to tourism, although in recent years it has suffered rockfalls and closures that forced conservation work.
The Chachapoyas, tall and with a warlike reputation, fiercely resisted Inca expansion before being subdued shortly before the arrival of the Spanish, around 1470. Their incorporation was so recent and so troubled that many of them later allied themselves with the conquistadors against Cusco.
The Chachapoyas paid a singular cult to their dead, whom they buried in impossible places, hanging from the cliffs. The sarcophagi of Karajía —human figures of clay more than two meters tall, with emphatic faces and headdresses, some crowned with skulls— have been watching for centuries from a rock wall that seems impossible to have reached.
The mausoleums of Revash, painted in red and ochre, hang from the crags like little gabled houses, true funerary 'citadels'. And at the Laguna de los Cóndores, in the south of the region, hundreds of funerary bundles were found with their quipus and offerings, kept today in the remarkable Museo de Leymebamba, which holds more than two hundred Chachapoya mummies.
These enigmatic monuments make Amazonas an open-air museum of Andean archaeology, in which every canyon seems to hide a mausoleum or a fortress waiting to be discovered.
The city of Chachapoyas, founded by the Spanish in 1538, is today the quiet capital of the region and a base for exploring this territory of mountains, cloud forests, rivers and caves. Its natural jewel is the Gocta waterfall, one of the highest in the world with its 771 meters of drop in two falls, which —despite its scale— remained outside the tourist circuit until it became internationally known in 2002, thanks to a German explorer and to the local people who had always known it.
Alongside Gocta there are other spectacular waterfalls such as Yumbilla, higher still, and a cloud forest landscape full of hummingbirds —including the very rare marvelous spatuletail, the symbol of the region—, orchids and mist forests of extraordinary biodiversity. The Utcubamba valley links together a good part of these attractions.
Amazonas thus combines a unique archaeological heritage with exuberant nature, in one of the most authentic and surprising regions of Peru for the traveler looking for history and nature off the conventional routes.
The north of the region, in the provinces of Bagua and Condorcanqui, is the territory of Amazonian Indigenous peoples, above all Awajún (Aguaruna) and Wampis, heirs to a long tradition of autonomy and of defense of their territory in the jungle of the Marañón and its tributaries. That presence gave Amazonas a double face: Andean-Chachapoya in the heights and fully Amazonian in the lowland jungle.
In 2009, the region was the scene of one of the most serious socio-environmental conflicts of recent Peru: the so-called 'Baguazo'. The protest by Indigenous communities against decrees that opened their territories to resource extraction without consultation ended, on June 5, in a violent clash with the police at the 'Curva del Diablo', which left dozens dead among natives and officers, and marked a before and after in the debate on the rights of the Amazonian peoples.
That episode drove the later Prior Consultation Law and turned Amazonas into a symbol of the struggle for the recognition of the country's Indigenous peoples.
The economy of Amazonas rests on the agriculture of the cloud forest —with a high-altitude coffee of growing prestige, such as that of Rodríguez de Mendoza, as well as cacao, sugar cane and fruit—, on livestock and on a tourism that is growing around Kuélap, Gocta and the Chachapoya sites. The region is one of the country's bets on cultural and nature tourism in the northeast.
Its territory keeps revealing surprises: the thick forest and the canyons still hide Chachapoya fortresses, mausoleums and cities waiting to be explored, and every season brings new finds that broaden what is known about this enigmatic culture of the clouds.
Less crowded than the southern circuit, Amazonas offers the traveler a unique combination of mysterious archaeology, colossal waterfalls and mist forests, in one of the most fascinating and least visited corners of Peru.
Apurímac —whose name in Quechua means 'the one who speaks' or 'lord who speaks', for the roar of its great river boxed into canyons— was the territory of the Chankas, a warlike confederation of peoples that at the beginning of the 15th century came to threaten the very existence of Cusco. Their attack and later defeat at the hands of the young prince who would become Pachacútec are, according to the chronicles, the founding episode of Inca expansion.
From that triumph came the impulse that would transform a small Cusco kingdom into the Tahuantinsuyo, so the history of the Chankas of Apurímac lies at the very origin of the Inca empire. The region was afterwards fully incorporated into the Andean world, linked together by roads and shrines.
Apurímac keeps a deeply Andean, Quechua and agricultural character, with peasant communities of long tradition, between deep canyons —such as that of the Apurímac river itself— and sacred mountains, or apus, that dominate the horizon, heirs to a worldview that still survives in its festivals and rituals, such as the Yawar Fiesta.
High up in the Apurímac canyon, on the border with Cusco, hides Choquequirao, 'the cradle of gold', an impressive Inca citadel considered Machu Picchu's sister for its architecture, its setting and its role as a ceremonial and administrative center. Still largely covered by vegetation —only a third has been excavated— and reachable only after two days of demanding hiking, it is one of the most impressive and least visited archaeological sites in Peru.
Its terraces decorated with llama figures in white stone, its plazas and its ceremonial buildings astonish whoever gets there, in a setting of mountains and precipices. For years there has been debate over building a cable car that would open it up to mass access, still pending.
Near Abancay, the enigmatic Saywite stone —an enormous monolith carved with more than two hundred figures of animals, terraces, canals and miniature buildings— shows the sophistication of Inca art, hydraulic engineering and worldview, and is believed to have served as a ritual model of the Andean world.
Abancay, the capital, is a quiet valley city in the shadow of the Ampay snow peak (5,235 m), protected by a national sanctuary that shelters one of the last forests of intimpa —an Andean tree related to the cypresses and in danger of extinction— and high-altitude lakes of crystal-clear water.
The region is the birthplace of José María Arguedas, born in Andahuaylas in 1911, the great Peruvian writer and anthropologist who portrayed like no one else the Andean world, the Quechua language and the country's painful cultural mestizaje in works such as 'Los ríos profundos' and 'Yawar Fiesta', the latter inspired by the bloody ritual bullfight of the region's towns. Andahuaylas, Chanka land par excellence, keeps that identity alive.
That literary and cultural legacy, together with its landscapes of canyons, snow peaks and lakes —such as Pacucha, next to the Sóndor archaeological site—, gives Apurímac a particular depth within the southern Peruvian highlands.
In recent decades, Apurímac has seen the irruption of large-scale copper mining. The Las Bambas mine, in the provinces of Cotabambas and Grau, above 4,000 meters and operated by the Chinese-owned company MMG, began commercial production in 2016 and became one of the largest copper deposits in Peru and in the world, supplying a significant share of national production.
But Las Bambas has been marked, from day one, by social conflict: the communities of Fuerabamba, Huancuire and others, which sold or gave up their lands, denounce the failure to honor commitments and the environmental damage, and have staged numerous blockades of the 'mining corridor' along which the ore is transported, with hundreds of days of interrupted operations. The conflict turned the region into a symbol of the tensions between mining, communities and the State in Peru.
That large investment brought resources, but also deep disputes over land, water and the sharing of the wealth, which remain open.
Today Apurímac combines the agriculture of its valleys and Andean livestock raising with the irruption of mining and with a growing adventure tourism, around Choquequirao, the Apurímac canyon —where whitewater rafting is practiced— and its imposing mountain landscapes. The region is one of the most authentic and least traveled in the southern highlands.
Its strong Chanka and Quechua identity shows in festivals such as the carnival of Abancay and of Andahuaylas, in its harp and violin music and in ritual traditions with deep pre-Hispanic roots. The memory of Arguedas and of the Chankas beats in its living culture.
Between the roar of its sacred river, the hidden citadel of Choquequirao, the shadow of the copper of Las Bambas and the legacy of Arguedas, Apurímac is one of the deepest and most challenging regions of Andean Peru.
The Andean south that today forms the region of Arequipa was inhabited from very remote times. In the Sumbay rock shelter, at more than four thousand meters above sea level, paintings more than eight thousand years old survive, depicting camelids, hunters and scenes of the puna, among the oldest testimonies of rock art in Peru. Later, in the Colca valley, the Collagua and Cabana peoples —of Aymara and Quechua roots— carved thousands of agricultural terraces that are still farmed today, taming the mountain with astonishing agricultural engineering and practicing cranial deformation as a mark of ethnic identity.
Under the gaze of the Misti (5,822 m), Chachani and Pichu Pichu volcanoes, these peoples were incorporated into Tawantinsuyu around the fifteenth century. The region's landscape is of extreme diversity: it runs from the coastal desert and the Mejía wetlands —a refuge for migratory birds facing the Pacific— to the high puna, and from the snowcapped volcanoes to colossal canyons such as the Colca and the Cotahuasi, the latter regarded as one of the deepest on the planet, with more than 3,500 meters of vertical drop.
On the flanks of the Coropuna and the Ampato, the mountains have given back extraordinary treasures: in 1995 the mummy of the 'Lady of Ampato', or Juanita, was found on the summit of Ampato, an adolescent girl sacrificed by the Incas in a capacocha ritual, today one of the great icons of high-altitude archaeology in Peru.
Arequipa was founded by the Spanish on 15 August 1540 under the name Villa Hermosa de Nuestra Señora de la Asunta, in a fertile valley watered by the Chili River at the foot of the Misti. Built with sillar —a white, porous stone of volcanic origin, cut from the nearby quarries—, its luminous historic center earned it the name 'White City' and its declaration as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000. Its jewel is the Monastery of Santa Catalina, a true religious citadel of narrow lanes and intensely colored courtyards inside the city, inhabited by cloistered nuns since 1579.
Arequipa's architecture, with its richly carved doorways that fuse Hispanic and Andean motifs —rosettes, mermaids, pumas, foliage—, forms a school of its own within mestizo baroque, admirably represented in the church of La Compañía and in the stately stone mansions. Isolated between the desert, the cordillera and the sea, and shaken periodically by earthquakes and eruptions, the city developed a strong regional character and a proud identity that always set it apart from the centralism of Lima.
That volcanic condition has marked its history with recurring catastrophes: earthquakes such as those of 1600 (made worse by the eruption of Huaynaputina), 1868 or the most recent one of 23 June 2001 —magnitude 8.4, with its epicenter off Camaná and a tsunami that killed more than a hundred people in the south— tested the White City again and again, and it always rose anew with its pale stone.
Arequipa was the scene of so many revolutions and uprisings through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that it earned the nickname 'caudillo city' or 'lioness of the south'. Revolts against centralist governments and dictatorships caught fire there, and out of its liberal tradition came decisive pronunciamientos of Peruvian republican history, such as the revolution of 1950 against the ochenio, the eight-year rule of Odría. That civic, rebellious calling is a central part of the identity of Arequipa.
The region is also one of the country's great intellectual cradles. Born in the city were the writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa (1936), the poet Alberto Hidalgo, the orator Francisco Mostajo and the thinker Víctor Andrés Belaunde, among many other figures of Peruvian letters, law and politics. Arequipa always cultivated the image of a cultured university city with a strong personality, with its distinctive accent and its fine, sly humor.
That pride is expressed in a rich intangible heritage: the traditional picanterías —declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation—, where rocoto relleno, Sunday adobo, ocopa and chupe de camarones are served; the pisco of its valleys; and a regional cuisine regarded as one of the richest and most celebrated in Peru.
The region's great natural destination is the Colca Canyon, a deep and spectacular valley some four hours from the city, where every morning the majestic Andean condor rides the air currents before the eyes of travelers at the Cruz del Cóndor. Its slopes are covered with pre-Inca terraces still under cultivation and with colonial villages such as Chivay, Yanque and Maca, where Collagua and Cabana dress, embroidery and traditions live on. Farther west opens the remote Cotahuasi Canyon, deeper still and almost untouched.
To this are added the climb up the Misti and the neighboring snowcapped peaks, a classic goal of Andean mountaineering; the geysers, hot springs and valleys of the volcanoes; the Inca site of Puerto Inca on the coast; and the Salinas y Aguada Blanca National Reserve, with its herds of vicuñas and its flamingos on high-altitude lagoons. Within a few hours of travel, then, the region brings together the desert, the sea, the volcanoes and the puna.
This combination of colonial heritage, food and spectacular nature makes Arequipa one of the most complete tourist destinations in Peru, and a natural base for exploring the whole Andean south of the country.
Today Arequipa is the country's second city and the great economic hub of southern Peru. Its economy combines the agro-industry of the surrounding countryside, trade, manufacturing, services and, above all, powerful mining: in its cordillera operates Cerro Verde, one of the largest copper deposits in Peru, which together with the extraction of gold, silver and molybdenum makes the region one of the country's great mining producers. The port of Matarani, on the Pacific, is a key outlet for those exports and for the Andean south.
That economic weight coexists with a strong university and cultural tradition, with a well-established tourism built around the White City and the Colca, and with persistent social and environmental tensions tied to water and to mining, such as the conflict over the Tía María project in the Tambo valley, which has pitted farmers against companies for years.
With its white stone, its volcanoes, its picanterías and its untamed character, Arequipa remains one of the regions with the most sharply drawn identity in Peru, proud of its history and with its eye on its role as capital of the south.
Ayacucho was the cradle of the Wari empire (6th-11th centuries), the first great expansionist state of the Andes. Its capital of the same name, near the present-day city, came to house tens of thousands of inhabitants in a vast complex of walls, plazas and stone enclosures. The Wari developed an advanced urban and administrative organization, a network of roads and provincial centers, and a system of colonies and storehouses that, centuries later, the Incas would inherit and perfect.
Their iconographic and political influence spread across much of ancient Peru, diffusing styles of ceramics, textiles and a religious cult tied to the staff god, shared with Tiwanaku. The archaeological site of Wari, with its imposing walls, is one of the most extensive pre-Hispanic urban complexes in the country.
Before and after them, the south-central sierra was settled by peoples such as the Chanka —who at the beginning of the 15th century came to threaten Cusco before being defeated by Pachacútec— and the Pocra, over whose territories the Inca administration and later the colonial one would be organized.
On 9 December 1824, on the pampa of Quinua, on the outskirts of the city, the patriot army under Marshal Antonio José de Sucre definitively defeated the royalist army of viceroy José de la Serna at the battle of Ayacucho. The Capitulation signed after the engagement put an end to almost three centuries of Spanish rule and sealed the independence not only of Peru, but of all continental South America.
In honor of that feat, the city —founded by the Spanish in 1540 as San Juan de la Frontera de Huamanga— received in 1825 its present name of Ayacucho, usually translated from Quechua as 'corner of the dead'. A monumental obelisk stands today on the pampa of Quinua in memory of the victors of the last great battle of American independence, whose bicentenary was commemorated in 2024.
That battlefield, at more than 3,300 meters of altitude, remains one of the great places of memory of Spanish American emancipation.
Ayacucho is famous for its more than thirty colonial churches —hence its nickname of 'city of churches'— and for its Holy Week, one of the most fervent, crowded and beautiful in the Americas, which fills its streets with processions, flower carpets and music for a whole week. It is one of the most important religious festivities on the continent and draws thousands of visitors.
The region is also the capital of Peruvian folk art: the Ayacucho retablos —portable boxes with religious and everyday scenes—, the painted boards of Sarhua, the weavings, the Huamanga stone carvings and the fine silverwork and filigree are recognized the world over. Artists such as Joaquín López Antay, the first craftsman to receive the National Culture Prize, gave national prestige to this tradition, and the retablo itself later became a vehicle for recounting the memory of the armed conflict.
That density of faith, history and art makes Huamanga one of the cities with the most character and heritage in the Peruvian sierra.
Ayacucho bore the most tragic chapter of recent Peru. On 17 May 1980, in the district of Chuschi, the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso, born at the University of Huamanga around the professor Abimael Guzmán, burned ballot boxes and launched its 'people's war', beginning the internal armed conflict, the most violent period in the whole of republican history.
The Quechua-speaking peasant communities of Ayacucho were, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the hardest hit: more than 40% of the dead and disappeared of the entire conflict were concentrated in this department, caught between Sendero's brutality and the harsh response of the security forces. Entire villages were wiped out, and episodes such as those of Accomarca or the disappearance of students left a deep mark on the region.
Today Ayacucho is rebuilding its memory with spaces such as the sanctuary of La Hoyada and the Museo de la Memoria 'Para que no se repita', and honors its victims while projecting to the world its enormous cultural and archaeological wealth.
With the decades of violence behind it, Ayacucho has flourished again as one of the great cultural destinations of Peru. Its Holy Week, its carnival, its crafts and its archaeological heritage —Wari, Vilcashuamán with its pyramidal ushnu, the Sondondo valley with its terraces— attract travelers from all over the world, and the city of Huamanga has consolidated itself as a lively tourist and university center.
The regional economy rests on Andean agriculture, on livestock —with the vicuña and the great 'chaccus', or communal shearings, in the Pampa Galeras National Reserve, a world benchmark for the recovery of this camelid—, on crafts and on a growing tourism. The region remains, however, among those with the greatest social and poverty challenges in the country.
Between its founding glory as cradle of the Wari and seat of independence, its extraordinary folk art and the memory of its recent tragedy, Ayacucho is one of the most profound and moving regions of Peru.
The Cajamarca valley, with its temperate climate and fertile land at some 2,750 meters of altitude, was settled from remote times. Its oldest landmark are the enigmatic aqueducts and channels carved into the rock at Cumbemayo, some three thousand years old and still admirably preserved, and the 'ventanillas' —funerary niches dug into stone cliffs— of Otuzco and Combayo.
The region was the seat of the Cajamarca culture, famous for its kaolin ceramics with fine painted decoration, and later received the influence of Chavín and of the Wari. Its position at the crossing between the coast, the sierra and the northern jungle made it a territory of intense exchange over millennia.
Toward the 15th century it was integrated into the Tahuantinsuyo as an important administrative center and resting point on the Qhapaq Ñan, provided with the hot springs that the Incas themselves frequented. It was there, in those baths now known as the Baths of the Incas, that Atahualpa was camped with his army when the Spanish arrived.
In Cajamarca the destiny of the Americas changed. On 16 November 1532, Francisco Pizarro and his just under two hundred men laid an ambush for the Inca Atahualpa in the city's main square: after a brief requerimiento read by friar Vicente de Valverde, the artillery and cavalry charged the unarmed retinue, massacred thousands of attendants and took the sovereign prisoner in barely half an hour.
In exchange for his freedom, Atahualpa offered to fill one room with gold and two more with silver —the famous 'Ransom Room', which can still be visited—, in the largest ransom in history. But, after collecting it and melting down that fabulous treasure, the Spanish tried him for conspiracy and executed him on 26 July 1533, having first baptized him as Francisco.
That episode marked the beginning of the end of the Inca empire and the start of the conquest and colonization of Peru, and turned Cajamarca into one of the places most laden with history in all the Americas.
Cajamarca is today the most important dairy basin in Peru, with a strong cattle-raising and cheese-making tradition inherited in part from European settlers and missionaries, which has made its cheeses, butters and manjares famous. Around that activity a major dairy industry has grown that supplies the whole country.
Its carnival is considered the most cheerful and unrestrained in Peru, with troupes, coplas, 'unshas' or yunzas and water fights that for days fill the city with color and music and draw visitors from all over the country. To that is added a valuable heritage: the colonial center with the Ransom Room and its baroque churches, the Baños del Inca, the monastic farm of Porcón, and the landscapes of a green and peaceful sierra.
That combination of history, nature and festivity makes Cajamarca one of the great cultural destinations of northern Peru.
In the Cajamarca cordillera lies Yanacocha, for years one of the largest open-pit gold mines in South America, which has operated since the 1990s and transformed the economy and the landscape of the region. Mining brought investment and jobs, but also deep socio-environmental conflicts over the use of water and land and the impact on the headwaters of the basins.
The most serious was the one surrounding the Conga project, an expansion of Yanacocha that sought to extract gold and copper above 3,700 meters, affecting several high Andean lakes. The opposition of the peasant communities and of the population, who feared for their water, set off strong protests: in 2012, five demonstrators died in the clashes in Celendín and Bambamarca, and the project was halted, becoming a national symbol of the conflicts between mining and water.
That confrontation shaped the politics and the identity of contemporary Cajamarca, divided between the promise of mining and the defense of its water resources.
Despite the enormous wealth generated by gold, Cajamarca is paradoxically one of the regions with the highest poverty rates in Peru, a contrast that fed much of the social unrest over mining. That tension between mineral abundance and the persistence of rural poverty is one of the great dilemmas of the northern Andes.
The region keeps a diverse economy: dairy farming and the agriculture of its valleys, mining, crafts and a rising historical and cultural tourism, with Cajamarca as a base and with destinations such as the ventanillas of Otuzco, Cumbemayo, the Baños del Inca and the route toward Kuntur Wasi and its pre-Inca gold treasures.
Between the weight of its history —the place where the Inca empire ended—, its green dairy countryside, its festive carnival and its conflicts over water and gold, Cajamarca condenses many of the tensions and beauties of the northern sierra of Peru.
Founded around 1537, barely two years after Lima, Callao very soon became the capital's port and the main maritime outlet of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The silver of Potosí passed across its docks on its way to Panama and Spain, and through it entered the European and Asian goods that supplied all of Spanish South America, which made it one of the most important trading centers of the Pacific.
That wealth made it a coveted target for pirates and privateers: in 1579 the Englishman Francis Drake attacked the port, and the threats repeated themselves over the centuries, forcing the crown to fortify the city and to organize the Armada del Mar del Sur to protect the silver fleets.
Callao was thus, for centuries, the maritime key to the Spanish empire in South America and the heart of its overseas trade.
On 28 October 1746, a devastating earthquake and the giant tidal wave that followed it completely destroyed the port and its old walled town, killing almost its entire population —it is estimated that of several thousand inhabitants only a handful survived— and wiping Callao off the map, in one of the greatest catastrophes in colonial American history.
After that tragedy, in the 18th century the crown raised the imposing Fortaleza del Real Felipe, one of the largest military constructions Spain built in the Americas, with its bastions, walls and stone turrets facing the sea, meant to defend the port from attacks and from smuggling.
That pentagonal fortress, today turned into a museum, is the great historical symbol of Callao and a witness to its centuries of war and trade.
During the independence period, the Real Felipe was the last great royalist redoubt in Peru: there the Spanish troops under José Ramón Rodil held out until January 1826, more than a year after the battle of Ayacucho, in a terrible siege that caused thousands of deaths from hunger and disease, being Spain's last stronghold in all of continental South America.
Decades later, in the Combat of the Second of May of 1866, Callao repelled the Spanish fleet that sought to reassert old claims over Peru, in an episode that united several South American nations against the aggression and in which the minister José Gálvez died. During the War of the Pacific, the port was again blockaded and occupied by Chile.
For its decisive role in national history, Callao received the singular rank of Constitutional Province, belonging to no department, a unique status it keeps to this day.
The 'chalaca' population of Callao has a strong and proud identity, forged on the shore of the sea and tied to football —with historic clubs such as Sport Boys—, to salsa and to the Afro-Peruvian and criollo music that runs through its neighborhoods. The port is the cradle of a rich popular culture, with its jaranas, its devotion and its fierce character.
Beyond port activity, the province offers singular corners: the seaside resort of La Punta, with its stately old houses and its seafront promenade; the historic islands of San Lorenzo —the largest on the Peruvian coast— and El Frontón, a former prison; and the cultural project of Monumental Callao, which has renewed the port's old quarter with art, murals and color.
Thus a province of centuries of military and commercial history is also reinventing itself as a space of culture, memory and seafaring identity.
Callao is home today to the country's main seaport —the Callao Port Terminal, one of the most important on the west coast of South America— and to the largest airport, the Jorge Chávez, making it the great entry and exit gate of Peru and an essential logistics hub of its foreign trade. Most of the country's non-mineral imports and exports pass through it.
To that port weight has been added in recent years the construction of the Chancay megaport, in the neighboring Lima region, which is reshaping the logistics map of the South Pacific; Callao remains, nonetheless, the country's traditional maritime heart. The province also faces serious challenges of security and urban coexistence in its neighborhoods.
Between its historic glory as a fortress and its condition as a great contemporary logistics gateway, Callao is a strategic piece of Peru: small in territory but enormous in its role for the national economy and history.
Cusco (Qosqo, 'navel' in Quechua) was the center of the Inca universe. According to the founding legend, it was established by Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo, children of the Sun who emerged from Lake Titicaca, guided by a golden staff that sank into its fertile soil. But it was the great Inca Pachacútec who, after defeating the Chancas around 1438, rebuilt the city on the plan of a puma and turned it into the monumental capital of the empire, from which the four regions, or suyos, were laid out.
Its walls of perfectly fitted stone —such as the famous twelve-angled stone— and temples like the Coricancha, the sanctuary of the Sun whose walls were once sheathed in sheets of gold, made Cusco the most impressive city in pre-Hispanic America. Around the capital, the Incas raised the ceremonial fortress of Sacsayhuamán, with its colossal megalithic blocks, and organized the Sacred Valley of the Urubamba as their imperial larder and garden, planted with terraces, palaces and shrines.
The Spanish took Cusco in November 1533. On the Inca foundations —which still hold up half the city— they raised churches, convents and mansions, giving rise to a unique architectural blend out of which came the famous Cusco School of painting, with its Virgins in triangular robes and its arquebus-bearing angels. Inca resistance, however, did not cease: in 1536 Manco Inca besieged the city for months from Sacsayhuamán and then withdrew to Vilcabamba, where the neo-Inca state survived until 1572.
Two centuries later, Cusco was the epicenter of the great rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in 1780-1781, the largest indigenous uprising of the colonial era, whose leader was executed in the city's main square. The earthquakes of 1650 and 1950 marked its urban history and brought down a good part of its churches, but the city kept its Andean soul intact. In 1983, its historic center was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco.
High on a mountain above the Urubamba canyon, the citadel of Machu Picchu —probably a royal estate and sanctuary built at the order of Pachacútec around 1450— remained hidden from Western eyes for centuries, known only to local peasants, until the American explorer Hiram Bingham made it known to the world in 1911. Declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1983 and chosen as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World in 2007, it is today the absolute icon of Peru.
The Inca Trail that leads up to it —a stretch of the Qhapaq Ñan— winds between high passes and ruins hidden in the mist. In its surroundings, the Sacred Valley unfolds Inca jewels such as Ollantaytambo, the living town that keeps its original layout; Písac and its terraces; Moray and its enigmatic circular terraces; and the salt pans of Maras, worked since pre-Inca times. All of it turned the region into the tourist and archaeological capital of South America.
Beyond the ruins, the department of Cusco holds some of the most spectacular mountain landscapes in the Andes. The Vilcanota range, crowned by the snow peak of Ausangate (6,384 m) —the most venerated apu, or sacred mountain, in the region—, offers multi-day treks among turquoise lakes, alpaca herds and hot springs. At its foot lies Vinicunca, the 'Mountain of Seven Colors', whose mineral bands were revealed as the glaciers melted and which over the last decade became one of the most photographed destinations in the country.
The region also combines the adventure of Choquequirao —Machu Picchu's sister citadel, still half buried in the jungle—, the Cocalmayo hot springs in Santa Teresa, the site of Raqchi with its great temple to Wiracocha, the Inca hydraulic engineering of Tipón and the gateway to the Amazon of Manu National Park. From glacier to jungle in a few hours, Cusco sums up the astonishing diversity of Peru.
Huancavelica, one of the highest and most rugged regions of Peru, was inhabited by Andean peoples such as the Anqaras, Chocorvos and Astos, and later brought into the Tahuantinsuyo, which tied it together through the Qhapaq Ñan and centers such as Incahuasi de Vilca and the Inca baths of the area. Its geography of freezing punas, snow peaks like the Sacsarccocha and deep valleys shaped a herding and farming culture with strong Quechua roots.
That inheritance shows in some of the most living traditions of the Andes: the extremely fine Huancavelica textile work, with its weavings and embroidery, and the patron saint festivals that preserve a deep pre-Hispanic background, with their ritual dances and their brotherhoods.
To this day the region keeps one of the most traditional and Quechua-speaking Andean worlds in the country, with peasant communities of long continuity and a life tied to the puna and to the camelid herds.
The cultural emblem of the region is the scissors dance, or 'danzaq', a ritual and competitive form in which the dancers, to the sound of harp and violin, perform physical and acrobatic feats while ringing two loose metal blades held in the right hand, in the manner of scissors. According to tradition, the dancers make a 'pact' with the apus and the mountain spirits in order to achieve their feats.
This dance, found across Huancavelica, Ayacucho and Apurímac, was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco in 2010, and is one of the most impressive and mysterious expressions of Andean folk art. It was also immortalized by José María Arguedas in his story 'La agonía de Rasu Ñiti'.
Alongside it, other dances, festivals and textile traditions make Huancavelica one of the richest regions of intangible heritage in Peru.
The fate of Huancavelica was sealed in 1564 with the discovery of the Santa Bárbara mercury mine, later nicknamed 'the mine of death'. Mercury, or quicksilver, was indispensable for refining the silver of Potosí through the amalgam method, so Huancavelica became a key and irreplaceable piece of the colonial economic system: without its quicksilver there was no silver, and without silver there was no empire.
The two mines were thus locked into a single mechanism that sustained the wealth of the Spanish crown for almost three centuries. But that mechanism ran on blood: the mining mita forced thousands of indigenous people to go down in shifts into the tunnels of Santa Bárbara, where the mercury vapors caused terrible illnesses —the trembling, the loss of teeth— and a very high mortality. Tens of thousands of indigenous people are estimated to have lost their lives there over the course of the colonial period.
For more than two centuries Huancavelica was thus the dark reverse of the splendor of Potosí, and its history condenses the human cost of the colonial mining system.
Founded as Villa Rica de Oropesa in 1571, by order of Viceroy Toledo, to administer the quicksilver mines, the city of Huancavelica preserves a remarkable colonial heritage of churches with gilded altarpieces —such as the cathedral and San Francisco— and stone mansions, along with its San Cristóbal thermal baths, whose waters come out of the mountain hot.
After mercury was exhausted and went into decline, already in the nineteenth century, the region was left behind and isolated, and today it is one of the most rural, with the highest poverty rates and the greatest social challenges in the country. The environmental liabilities of the old mercury mining are still there, with contamination in the city of Huancavelica itself.
That combination of colonial glory and later neglect marks the long history of a region that was strategic for the empire and then stayed on the margins of Peruvian development.
Huancavelica holds extraordinary cultural wealth —its dances, its weavings, its patron saint festivals, its harp and violin music— and Andean landscapes of great beauty, such as the puna of Castrovirreyna, the lakes of Choclococha and Orcococha, the camelid grasslands and the scenes of shepherds and herds on the altiplano.
Its economy rests on high-altitude farming and herding, on mining and on a fledgling tourism, in a region of difficult, heavily fragmented geography with serious problems of connectivity and poverty. Energy is one of its resources: its territory holds important hydroelectric plants on the Mantaro, which supply a good part of the country.
In the deep heart of the central Andes, Huancavelica offers the traveler one of the most authentic, traditional and least traveled faces of Peru, with the memory of quicksilver and the vitality of its dances as the marks of its identity.
Huánuco holds one of the oldest testimonies of Andean religion: the temple of Kotosh, with its famous relief of the Crossed Hands, some four thousand years old, one of the earliest expressions of symbolic art and ceremonial architecture in Peru. The 'Kotosh religious tradition', with its chambers of hearths for burnt offerings, spread across much of the central sierra in the Formative period, showing organized cults millennia before the Incas.
Older still are the remains of Lauricocha, in the heights of the region, where skeletons and tools of hunters from some ten thousand years ago were found, among the earliest known inhabitants of the central Andes.
The region, straddling the high sierra and the edge of the cloud forest, was settled by peoples such as the Yaros, the Chupaychos and the Panataguas, and was always a crossroads between the Andean world and the Amazon, which gave it a great diversity of ecological tiers, cultures and products.
In the puna of the region the Incas built one of their largest administrative centers: Huánuco Pampa —or Huánuco Viejo—, a monumental city with several thousand structures around an enormous plaza presided over by a ceremonial ushnu of fine stonework, a key point of the Qhapaq Ñan on its route toward the north of the empire.
Its magnificent state of preservation, on an open altiplano, makes it one of the best examples of provincial Inca urbanism and a standout stop on the Inca road recognized by Unesco. Storehouses (qollqas), elite residences and ritual spaces worked there, articulating the government of the Chinchaysuyo.
After the conquest, in 1539 the Spanish founded the city of León de Huánuco de los Caballeros, which later moved to its present site, in a valley with a temperate, mild climate all year round that earned it the fame of the 'best climate in the world'.
The colonial city of Huánuco preserves churches and mansions and keeps singular traditions, such as the dance of the Negritos de Huánuco, an expression of colonial and Afro-Andean roots declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation, which at every year's end fills the streets with troupes of dancers in black masks, in honor of the Christ Child.
The Huallaga valley and its surroundings also preserve sites such as Tantamayo, with its several-story stone towers built by pre-Inca cultures, and a countryside of springlike climate that made the city famous. Huánuco was also, during the independence era, the scene of the early rebellion of 1812.
That mix of archaeological heritage, colonial architecture and living traditions gives Huánuco a character of its own in the geographic heart of Peru.
To the east, the region drops toward the high jungle of the Huallaga valley, where Tingo María lies, the 'Gateway to the Amazon', dominated by the silhouette of the mountain known as the Sleeping Beauty. There stand Tingo María National Park, one of the first in Peru, and the Cueva de las Lechuzas, home to the guácharos, nocturnal birds that nest inside it.
This area lived through, like others in the high jungle, the hard years of drug trafficking and violence in the Alto Huallaga during the 1980s and 1990s, when the basin was one of the great focal points of coca growing and of the confrontation between Sendero Luminoso, the drug traffickers and the security forces.
Today the region is moving toward tourism, coffee, cacao and alternative crops, and Tingo María is establishing itself as a nature and adventure destination in the central-northern jungle.
Huánuco combines a millennia-old archaeological heritage, running from Kotosh to Huánuco Pampa, with landscapes that descend from the glacial puna to the tropical jungle, and with a mestizo culture that links the Andes to the Amazon. Its economy rests on the farming of potatoes, maize and fruit trees in the sierra, on the coffee and cacao of the jungle, on livestock, on mining and on a growing tourism.
The region faces significant challenges of rural poverty, connectivity and informality, in a territory of difficult geography, heavily fragmented among valleys, punas and jungle. Its central position makes it, nonetheless, a strategic crossing of routes between the coast, the sierra and the Amazon.
Between the Crossed Hands of Kotosh, the Inca city of Huánuco Pampa, its springlike climate and the jungle gateway of Tingo María, Huánuco sums up the role of hinge between the great geographic worlds of Peru.
The Ica desert was the cradle of two of the most fascinating cultures of ancient Peru. The Paracas (8th century BC - 2nd century AD) left funerary mantles of incomparable textile fineness —embroidered with threads dyed in dozens of colors that still keep their brightness— and practiced complex cranial trepanations, evidence of a sophisticated medicine. Their funerary bundles, found on the Paracas peninsula, rank among the treasures of world textile art.
Their heirs, the Nazca (100 BC - 800 AD), traced on the pampa the celebrated Nazca Lines: gigantic geoglyphs of animals —the hummingbird, the monkey, the spider, the condor— and geometric shapes etched into the ground, some of them hundreds of meters across, fully visible only from the air. Declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1994, they remain one of the great enigmas of archaeology: they are believed to have had a ritual and astronomical meaning, tied to water and fertility.
These desert peoples mastered the scarcest resource with astonishing engineering: the puquios, spiral underground aqueducts that to this day still carry water to the fields, testimony to an admirable hydraulic knowledge in one of the most arid zones on the planet.
With the city of Ica founded in 1563 as Villa de Valverde, the region prospered on the vineyards the Spanish planted in its sunny, irrigated valleys. From those grapes came pisco, the grape brandy that takes its name from the port and the river of Pisco, and which today is Peru's flagship drink, the base of the famous pisco sour. The colonial wineries and their great clay jars forged a winemaking tradition that is still alive.
Through the bay of Paracas, in September 1820, San Martín's Liberating Army came ashore, launching the independence campaign from the south; there, as tradition has it, San Martín conceived the first national symbols and a Peruvian flag was raised for the first time. The region was thus bound to the very birth of the republic.
That past survives in the haciendas, the wineries and the grape harvest festivals, which every summer celebrate in the city of Ica the heritage of wine and pisco with contests, music and the crowning of the harvest queen.
The coast of Ica is one of the great centers of Afro-Peruvian culture. During the colonial period, thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to the region's haciendas, and from their descendants came a very rich tradition of music and dance. The district of El Carmen, in Chincha, is today the heart of that black culture: cradle of the festejo, the zamacueca, the alcatraz and the Peruvian cajón —the percussion instrument born from a simple wooden box— and of families of musicians who have carried it to the world.
This heritage is an essential part of the identity of Ica and of Peru, and it is celebrated in festivals and peñas where Afro-Peruvian music fills the valley's nights with rhythm. The memory of slavery and of freedom beats in its dances, in its décimas and in its cooking.
Alongside the Afro-Peruvian and the criollo, the region also preserves the stamp of its pre-Hispanic cultures, in a deep mestizaje that makes the Ica coast a unique cultural mosaic.
Ica combines landscapes found nowhere else in Peru. The Huacachina oasis, a lagoon ringed by palm trees amid gigantic dunes, is today a mecca for sandboarding and for rides in dune buggies over the mountains of sand. Off the coast, the Ballestas Islands and the Paracas National Reserve shelter enormous colonies of sea lions, Humboldt penguins, guano birds and flamingos, which has earned them the nickname of 'the Peruvian Galápagos'; on the peninsula, moreover, the enigmatic Candelabro geoglyph is traced into the hillside.
To that are added the Inca site of Tambo Colorado, one of the best preserved on the coast for its adobe walls that still hold traces of paint; the flights over the Nazca Lines; the lagoons of Huacachina and the dunes of Ocucaje; and a cuisine and wines that make Ica a destination joining desert, sea, history and pleasure.
This array of attractions, a few hours from Lima, has turned the region into one of the country's most popular tourist destinations, for Peruvian and international travelers alike.
Today the region lives on the export farming of table grapes, asparagus, paprika, citrus and avocados —irrigated by projects that draw on groundwater and on the rivers—, on pisco, on fishing and on a steadily growing tourism. The valleys of Ica have become one of the great hubs of modern agriculture in Peru, with strong demand for labor and a notable economic dynamism.
The region's recent memory is marked by the earthquake of 15 August 2007, of a magnitude close to 8, whose epicenter off Pisco killed hundreds, destroyed much of that city and of Chincha and Ica, and damaged the heritage and infrastructure of the entire southern coast. Reconstruction was long and left lessons about the country's seismic vulnerability.
Between its millennia-old geoglyphs, its Afro-Peruvian culture, its pisco and its modern agro-industry, Ica is one of the regions that best sums up the contrasts of the Peruvian coast: extreme desert and fertile land at once, enigmatic past and thriving present.
The fertile Mantaro valley, in the heart of the central Andes, was the territory of the Huancas, a warlike people with a strong identity who stubbornly resisted Inca expansion and who, precisely because of that old confrontation, allied themselves with the Spanish during the conquest, supplying them with thousands of warriors and provisions. The region preserves Inca tambos and sites such as Wariwillka —a sanctuary tied to the mythical origins of the Huancas—.
The Mantaro is today one of the culturally most alive valleys in Peru, with a very rich tradition of fairs, of craftwork in engraved gourds and silverwork, and of music and dance, such as the huaylas, the santiago and the famous festival of the avelinos. Its peasant communities preserve a strong Quechua-Huanca identity and an economy of small, highly productive plots.
Around Lake Junín or Chinchaycocha, one of the largest in the country and today a national reserve, stretches a high puna full of vicuñas and birds, the cradle of a herding tradition and a high Andean way of life with millennia-old roots.
The name of the region was carved into American history on 6 August 1824, when on the pampa of Junín, at more than four thousand meters of altitude, the United Liberating Army commanded by Simón Bolívar defeated the royalist cavalry in a singular battle, fought almost entirely with lance and saber and on horseback, with barely a shot fired from firearms. The final charge of the squadron of the 'Húsares del Perú' —who from then on were called 'Húsares de Junín'— decided the fight.
The victory at Junín, followed four months later by that of Ayacucho, opened the way to the definitive independence of Peru and of South America. A monument to the victors stands on the pampa today, and the battle is remembered every year as one of the founding feats of freedom on the continent. Its bicentenary was commemorated in 2024.
That feat of arms tied this central highland region forever to the epic of American emancipation, and gave its name to the department created in the young republic.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Junín became a great mining center —La Oroya, with its metallurgical smelting complex, and the heights toward Cerro de Pasco— connected to the coast by the Ferrocarril Central Andino, a nineteenth-century engineering feat designed by Ernest Malinowski, which climbs the Andes up to the Ticlio pass, at more than 4,800 meters, long considered the highest railway in the world.
The La Oroya smelter was an emblem of Peruvian mining and also, in the twenty-first century, one of the country's most serious cases of heavy metal contamination, with grave effects on the health of its people, which turned it into a symbol of the environmental liabilities of Andean mining.
Huancayo, 'la Incontrastable', is today the great city of the central highlands, famous for its Sunday Fair, its craftwork and its cooking of papa a la huancaína, pachamanca and trout, and the commercial hub of the whole region.
To the east, the region drops abruptly into the central jungle of Chanchamayo, La Merced, Satipo and Pichanaki, land of coffee, citrus, cacao and tropical fruit, settled since the nineteenth century by Andean and European migrants. It is home to the Asháninka people, one of the most numerous in the Peruvian Amazon, whose territory was hit hard by the violence of Sendero Luminoso in the 1980s and 1990s.
This high jungle, with its warm climate and its landscapes of mountains, waterfalls and coffee plantations, has become a destination for nature tourism and agritourism, with its coffee routes and its communal reserves. The coffee production of Chanchamayo and Satipo is among the most acclaimed in the country.
From the freezing moorland of the puna to the tropical rainforest, Junín concentrates the dizzying diversity of central Peru into a few kilometers, joining highlands and Amazon in a single territory.
Junín is one of the most dynamic and most populated regions of the Peruvian highlands, with a diversified economy that combines the farming of the Mantaro —potato, artichoke, maize, export crops—, high Andean herding, mining, the coffee of the central jungle and very active trade around Huancayo. The region is also an important educational and university center in the middle of the country.
Its culture is one of the richest in Andean Peru: the carnaval marqueño, the Santiago festival, the typical Mantaro orchestras with their harp, violin and saxophones, and a craft tradition —the engraved gourds of Cochas, the weavings, the filigree of San Jerónimo— recognized across the country. The tourist train that climbs from Lima to Huancayo keeps the epic of the central railway alive.
Between the historic pampa of Junín, the fertile Mantaro valley, the mining heights and the coffee jungle, the region sums up the hinge role of the central highlands in the geography, the history and the economy of Peru.
The coast of La Libertad was one of the great stages of the pre-Inca civilizations. In the Moche valley the Mochica flourished (first to eighth centuries), masters of portrait pottery —which reproduces faces and scenes with astonishing realism— and of goldwork, who raised the monumental Huacas of the Sun and the Moon, decorated with polychrome murals of their gods, among them the fearsome Ai Apaec or 'the Decapitator'. Their decline, toward the eighth century, has been linked to devastating climate episodes tied to the El Niño phenomenon.
Centuries later, the Chimú kingdom or Chimor built Chan Chan, capital of a state that came to dominate some thousand kilometers of coast from the year 900. Its ten enormous adobe 'citadels' or palaces, with walls decorated with reliefs of fish, birds and waves, make Chan Chan the largest mud-brick city in all the Americas and a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1986. The Chimú, great goldsmiths and hydraulic engineers, were conquered by the Incas around 1470.
On the shoreline, fishermen who inherited those cultures still sail on 'caballitos de totora' in Huanchaco, as they did millennia ago, keeping alive a maritime tradition that goes back to the very origins of the north coast.
Founded by Diego de Almagro in 1534 and named by Pizarro in honor of his native Trujillo in Extremadura, the city became the main urban center of the north, with an elegant colonial core of mansions with baroque doorways, balconies and wrought-iron grilles, and of churches such as its cathedral. The seat of an intendancy in the eighteenth century, it was one of the first cities in Peru to proclaim independence, on 29 December 1820, even ahead of Lima, thanks to the leadership of the Marquis of Torre Tagle.
From that act the department of La Libertad, created in 1825, took its name, evoking the ideal of emancipation. For a time Trujillo was the provisional seat of the patriot authorities and the setting for the organization of the new state in the north, a role that reinforced its political and historical weight.
Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the region consolidated its character as the great agricultural and commercial center of the north, built around the sugar valleys and the city of Trujillo, head of an area key to the country's economy and politics.
The sugar-growing north of La Libertad, with its great estates and its rural proletariat, was one of the cradles of the labor movement and of the new ideologies of the twentieth century. Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre was born in Trujillo in 1895, founder of the APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana), the great anti-imperialist mass party of the people that would mark Peruvian politics through the century. The region thus became the historic stronghold of aprismo.
That deep-rootedness exploded in the tragic Trujillo Revolution of July 1932: APRA militants rose up and took the O'Donovan barracks, in an uprising that was harshly put down by the army. After it was crushed, dozens of detainees were taken to the ruins of Chan Chan and shot without trial beside the huacas, in one of the bloodiest episodes in Peruvian political history of the century, which left a deep wound between the APRA and the Armed Forces.
That past of social struggle, along with the strength of its sugar unions, gave La Libertad a singular weight in the political life of the country for a good part of the twentieth century.
Trujillo is known as the 'City of Eternal Spring' for its mild climate and as the capital of the marinera —the elegant, flirtatious national dance of Peru, celebrated every January in a great contest that brings together the best couples in the country— and of the Peruvian paso horse, the equestrian pride of the nation. Its festivals, its International Spring Festival and its intense cultural life confirm it as the capital of the north.
The region thus combines an extremely rich archaeological heritage —Chan Chan and the Moche huacas— with surf beaches such as Huanchaco and Chicama, the latter with one of the longest left-hand waves in the world, farming valleys and a northern cuisine of shambar, kid goat and ceviches. Beyond the coast, La Libertad rises toward the Andes, with highland towns such as Otuzco —sanctuary of the Virgen de la Puerta— and Huamachuco, and then descends to the high jungle of Gran Pajatén, in Río Abiseo National Park, another World Heritage site.
From coast to jungle, the region unfolds a diversity that makes it a microcosm of Peru, with Trujillo as one of its great cultural capitals.
Today La Libertad is one of the great economic poles of Peru and the national leader in export agro-industry. The key to that transformation was the Chavimochic project, begun in 1986, which diverted the waters of the Santa river to irrigate tens of thousands of hectares of coastal desert. Those barren sands became fields of asparagus, blueberries, avocados and table grapes that supply markets all over the world, placing the region and Peru among the powers of global agricultural export.
Alongside agro-industry come the sugar cane of its traditional valleys, gold mining in the highlands —with the large Lagunas Norte mine—, the footwear industry in the district of El Porvenir, and dynamic trade and services around Trujillo, one of the largest cities in the country. This drive coexists with challenges such as security, water and informality.
Between its glorious Moche and Chimú past, its aprista tradition, its culture of marinera and paso horse and its modern agro-export muscle, La Libertad is one of the regions that best sums up the long history and the thriving present of the Peruvian north.
Lambayeque was one of the great centers of the coastal civilizations of ancient Peru. The Moche culture flourished here and, after it, the Sicán or Lambayeque culture (eighth to fourteenth centuries), famous for its exquisite goldwork and for its mythical founder, Naylamp, who —according to the legend recorded by the chroniclers— arrived by sea in a fleet of rafts to give rise to a dynasty of lords who ruled the region.
These cultures mastered the hydraulic engineering of the desert, with extensive canals linking valleys, and reached a metalworking skill that made the north one of the gold capitals of ancient Peru. Their religion, tied to the sea, the sun and the ancestors, was expressed in mud temples and in tombs of extraordinary wealth.
On that root the Chimú administration and later the Inca one would be organized, in a region always marked by its farming, maritime and trading vocation.
The region astonished the world in 1987 with the discovery, by the archaeologist Walter Alva, of the intact tomb of the Lord of Sipán, a third-century Moche ruler buried with a fabulous array of gold, silver, gilded copper and turquoise, along with attendants and offerings. The find, made after the police raised the alarm about looters at Huaca Rajada and funded in part by the National Geographic Society, was a milestone of American archaeology.
Compared to Tutankhamun's for its wealth and for being unlooted, the discovery changed the understanding of the Moche forever and raised the prestige of Peruvian archaeology. Other elite tombs followed, such as those of the Old Lord of Sipán and the Lord of Sicán, which confirmed the region as one of the great gold capitals of ancient Peru.
Today those treasures are displayed in cutting-edge museums, above all in the Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán, in the city of Lambayeque, opened in 2002 and one of the most visited in the country.
Near the city of Lambayeque rises Túcume, the 'valley of the pyramids', a monumental complex of more than twenty enormous adobe huacas raised by the Lambayeque culture around Cerro La Raya, and occupied afterward by the Chimú and the Incas. It is one of the largest mud-architecture complexes in the Americas.
Beside it, Batán Grande —today the Bosque de Pómac Historical Sanctuary, in the middle of the carob groves— holds other Sicán pyramids and the tombs where tons of gold objects were found, in a dry forest full of birds and thousand-year-old carob trees. These sites, also magnificently displayed in the Museo Nacional Sicán in Ferreñafe, make Lambayeque a first-rank archaeological destination.
Tradition also credits these lands with a strong legacy of healers and shamans, heirs to an ancient ritual knowledge of the north that survives in towns such as Salas, considered the 'witchcraft capital' of Peru.
Chiclayo, the 'capital of friendship', grew from a modest Indian town and colonial convent into the main commercial city of the Peruvian north and one of the largest in the country, without ever having been formally founded by the Spanish, a singular case in the urban history of Peru. Its position at a crossroads made it prosper as a center of exchange.
Its Mercado Modelo, with its famous section of herbs, amulets and objects for the healers, reflects the vitality of northern popular and magical-religious culture. Near the city, the historic town of Zaña, wiped out by a flood in 1720, preserves the ruins of its great colonial convents and a strong Afro-Peruvian heritage.
Lambayeque thus combines a dazzling pre-Hispanic past with a vibrant urban and commercial life around Chiclayo, the economic heart of the region.
The region lives on agro-industry —sugar cane, rice, pulses, maize and a growing fruit export trade—, on commerce, on fishing in coves such as Santa Rosa and San José, and on a tourism that revolves around its extraordinary Moche and Lambayeque heritage. The large irrigation projects, such as Olmos, which channels water from the Amazon watershed into the desert, have widened the region's farming frontier.
Its cuisine is one of the most celebrated in Peru, with dishes such as arroz con pato a la chiclayana, the 'espesado', the chinguirito, kid goat with beans and the sweet 'King Kong' of manjar blanco, the pride of the region's confectioners. The dry carob forest, the beaches of Pimentel and Puerto Eten with its historic pier, and the warmth of its people round out its identity.
Between its lords of gold, its mud pyramids, its culture of healers and its thriving city of Chiclayo, Lambayeque is one of the regions richest in history and flavor on the north coast of Peru.
Long before Lima existed, the central Peruvian coast was the cradle of civilization in the Americas. In the Supe valley, north of today's region, Caral rose around 3000 BC, the oldest city in the Americas, with its pyramids and circular plazas built without pottery and sustained by fishing and cotton growing. It has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2009.
Centuries later, lordships and great sanctuaries flourished in the valleys of the Rímac, the Chillón and the Lurín. The most important was Pachacámac, the great oracle of the coast, venerated by pilgrims from all over the Andes for more than a thousand years, whose voice —as people believed— foretold the future and caused earthquakes. Coastal cultures such as the Lima and the Ichma used the three rivers that come down from the highlands to irrigate the desert and sustain cities and mud temples (huacas), many of which still stand among the buildings of today's metropolis.
Francisco Pizarro founded Lima on 18 January 1535 under the name City of Kings, and chose it as the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru for its mild climate and its closeness to the port of Callao. For almost three centuries, Lima was the seat of Spanish power in South America and one of the most opulent cities in the Americas: its University of San Marcos (1551) is the oldest on the continent, and its historic center —with the Plaza Mayor, the Cathedral, the convent of San Francisco and its carved cedar balconies— is a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The viceroys governed here, the Tribunal of the Inquisition operated here, and here San Martín proclaimed Independence on 28 July 1821. After emancipation, the city was the seat of the republican governments, suffered the Chilean occupation from 1881 to 1883 during the War of the Pacific and, already in the nineteenth century, saw the birth of elite seaside districts such as Barranco, with its bohemian life and its mansions facing the sea, and Miraflores, on the cliffs of the Costa Verde.
From the middle of the twentieth century, Lima grew explosively with the migration of millions of Peruvians from the Andes and the jungle, fleeing poverty and, later, the violence of the armed conflict. They built new districts and 'pueblos jóvenes' on the sands, and turned the city into a metropolis of more than ten million inhabitants, the most populated in the country and one of the largest in Latin America. That massive mixing turned the old criollo city into a fully Andean and working-class capital.
Out of that mixture came its culinary fame too: Lima is today recognized as the culinary capital of Latin America, where criollo cooking, ceviche, nikkei food —a Japanese-Peruvian fusion— and chifa of Chinese origin live side by side. Several of its restaurants rank among the best in the world, and its cultural life, its museums and its bohemian side have confirmed it as one of the great centers of the region.
Beyond the capital, the region of Lima unfolds surprising landscapes. In the middle of the coastal desert the lomas appear, fog oases that turn green in winter, such as the Lomas de Lachay, a refuge for flora and fauna. To the south there are seaside resorts and beaches such as Cerro Azul, while inland valleys, such as Lunahuaná, have become adventure destinations for their rapids, vineyards and pisco wineries.
Climbing toward the Andes, the region holds treasures such as the Marcahuasi plateau, with its enigmatic rock formations; the Nor Yauyos-Cochas Landscape Reserve, of turquoise lakes and stepped waterfalls; and the heights of the Pariacaca snow peak, an ancient apu of Andean mythology sung in the myths of Huarochirí. So, within a few hours' radius, the region of Lima brings together the sea, the desert, the valleys and the high mountains that sum up the geography of Peru.
Loreto, the largest region in Peru —it covers almost a third of the national territory—, is the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. Its great rivers —the Amazon, born here from the confluence of the Marañón and the Ucayali, along with the Napo, the Putumayo and the Yavarí— have for millennia been home to dozens of Indigenous peoples: Kukama-Kukamiria, Achuar, Bora, Huitoto, Ticuna, Secoya, Kichwa and many more, hunters, fishers and farmers of the floodplain forest who still keep their languages, their worldviews and their deep knowledge of the forest.
This immense tropical plain, covered by one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity on the planet, remained on the margins of the Andean world and of colonial rule for centuries. Only the Jesuit and Franciscan missions ventured into it from the seventeenth century onward, founding small settlements on the riverbanks that would become the seeds of today's cities, in the celebrated 'Missions of Maynas'.
That legacy of river worlds and original peoples still defines the Amazonian identity of Loreto, where the river is everything: road, food, border and way of life.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rubber fever transformed Loreto. World demand for rubber for the infant automobile industry sent prices soaring, and Iquitos, on the banks of the Amazon, filled up with fortunes and with mansions clad in tiles imported from Europe —such as the famous Casa de Fierro, whose metal structure is attributed to the workshop of Gustave Eiffel—, becoming a prosperous, cosmopolitan jungle city connected by steamship to the Atlantic and to Europe.
But that wealth had an appalling face. The enslavement, torture and massacres of Indigenous peoples on the Putumayo by Julio César Arana's Casa Arana amounted to one of the greatest crimes against humanity of the age, denounced internationally by the Irish diplomat Roger Casement, whose report shook the world. Tens of thousands of Indigenous people are estimated to have died under that system of terror.
When rubber tree seeds, smuggled out by the English, made plantations flourish in Southeast Asia, the Amazonian monopoly collapsed and the region fell into a long decline, from which Iquitos kept, as a memento, the lavish mansions of the rubber-era Belle Époque.
In the twentieth century, Loreto was the scene of border tensions over its vast and ill-defined rainforest. The Salomón-Lozano Treaty of 1922 ceded to Colombia the so-called Amazonian Trapezoid, with the port of Leticia on the Amazon, which caused deep resentment among the people of Loreto, who felt that territory to be their own and key to their river trade.
That rejection led, on September 1, 1932, to the seizure of Leticia by a group of Peruvian civilians and soldiers, which set off an undeclared armed conflict between Peru and Colombia in the middle of the Amazon, with river and air combat on the region's waterways. The war ended in 1933 with the Peruvian withdrawal and the mediation of the League of Nations, and was settled by the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1934, which confirmed the border still in force.
That episode marked the memory of Loreto and reinforced its strong regional identity, often assertive in the face of Lima's centralism, in a region that knows itself to be distant, enormous and singular within Peru.
Iquitos is today the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon and the biggest city in the world that cannot be reached by road: only by river or by air. With its waterfront promenade on the Amazon, its floating neighborhood of Belén —an 'Amazonian Venice' of houses on stilts and rafts—, its motorcycle taxis and its lively mix of cultures, it is the gateway to one of the greatest wildlife refuges on the planet.
Very close by lies the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, the largest protected floodplain forest in the Peruvian Amazon, home to the pink river dolphin, the giant river otter, the paiche, macaws, manatees and an extraordinary fauna, as well as the Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve, famous for its extremely high diversity of birds. This rainforest has also yielded major oil discoveries, which made Loreto a key region for the country's hydrocarbon industry.
The region lives off the river in every respect: fishing, river trade, oil and a nature tourism that draws travelers from all over the world.
More than any other region, Loreto embodies the Amazonian face of Peru: a unique mestizo culture, with its cuisine of juanes, tacacho con cecina, inchicapi and river fish such as paiche or doncella; its legends of beings of the forest and the water —the yacuruna, the mermaid, the chullachaqui—; its pandilla music and its fervor for the festivities of San Juan, patron saint of the Amazon. Ayahuasca and other master plants are part of a vast body of Indigenous medicinal knowledge that today also draws visitors from around the world.
That richness coexists with enormous challenges: deforestation, oil spills in the rivers, illegal mining and logging, and the historic neglect of its Indigenous peoples and its riverside towns by a centralized state. The defense of the forest and of community rights is today one of the region's great debates.
Immense, remote and biodiverse, Loreto is at once one of the planet's lungs and one of Peru's living frontiers, where the country dissolves into the endless green of the Amazon.
The region of Madre de Dios, in the southeastern Amazon, owes its name to the great river that crosses it, a tributary of the Amazon through the Madeira basin. For millennia it has been the territory of Indigenous peoples such as the Ese Eja, Harakbut, Matsigenka, Yine and Amahuaca, as well as of groups in voluntary isolation —the so-called uncontacted peoples, such as the Mashco Piro— who still live without contact with national society in the deepest parts of the rainforest, and whose protection is one of the country's great ethical challenges.
Its rivers, its oxbow lakes or 'cochas' —old meanders abandoned by the river channel, such as Sandoval or Valencia— and its 'collpas' —clay banks where hundreds of parrots and macaws gather every dawn to take in minerals— make this one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.
It was one of the last areas to be fully incorporated into Peru, remaining almost unexplored well into the twentieth century and keeping to this day the character of an Amazonian frontier.
As in the rest of the Amazon, rubber brought the first settlers —and the first tragedies— to Madre de Dios in the early twentieth century. The region's legendary figure was the rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, who opened river routes between watersheds and even hauled a dismantled boat overland across an isthmus separating two basins, a feat that would inspire Werner Herzog's famous film 'Fitzcarraldo'.
Puerto Maldonado, founded in 1902 at the confluence of the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers, became the capital of the region, which was created as a department in 1912. The opening of the Interoceanic Highway, which links it to Cusco and to Brazil, accelerated colonization and trade in the twenty-first century, and also the pressure on the forest.
That long history of frontiers, rubber barons and settlers left a mixed and diverse society, shaped by waves of Andean migration and by the constant tension between exploiting the rainforest and conserving it.
Madre de Dios holds two of the most valuable natural areas on the planet. Manu National Park, a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1987, drops from Andean punas above four thousand meters down to the lowland rainforest, and protects record-breaking biodiversity: more than a thousand species of birds and a fauna that includes jaguars, otorongos, monkeys, the spectacled bear and the cock-of-the-rock, Peru's national bird.
Beside it, the Tambopata National Reserve and Bahuaja-Sonene National Park shelter the largest known macaw clay licks and lakes such as Sandoval and Valencia, full of caimans, giant otters, birds and astonishing wildlife. For this richness, Peru declared Madre de Dios the 'biodiversity capital'.
Ecotourism, with its lodges deep in the rainforest on the riverbanks, offers travelers one of the last great wildlife refuges in the world, and has become one of the region's main bets on sustainable development.
The dark side of that natural wealth is gold mining. Drawn by the alluvial gold of its rivers, tens of thousands of miners have arrived in Madre de Dios in recent decades, above all in the area known as La Pampa, on the edge of the Tambopata Reserve. Illegal and informal mining has razed vast stretches of rainforest —on the order of hundreds of thousands of devastated hectares— and contaminated rivers, fish and the population itself with mercury, in one of Peru's worst environmental disasters.
That mercury, used to amalgamate the gold, has pushed levels of the toxic metal in the blood of many inhabitants and Indigenous communities above permitted limits. In 2019 the State launched 'Operation Mercury' to drive the miners out of La Pampa and reclaim the area, with partial results and hotspots that keep reappearing.
The struggle to halt illegal mining, restore the forest and protect communities and peoples in isolation shapes life in the region today and is one of the country's great environmental dilemmas.
Today Madre de Dios lives in permanent tension between two models: conservation and ecotourism, which make it a world-famous destination for nature lovers, and the extraction of gold and timber, which threatens its forests and its rivers. The Interoceanic Highway, which connected it with Brazil and the Pacific, has been at once an engine of development and a route for the spread of illegal activities.
Puerto Maldonado, its capital, is the base for exploring Tambopata and Manu, with a warm Amazonian life, its cuisine of patarashca, motelo and forest fruits such as aguaje and the castaña —the Amazon nut that gives its name to an entire forest economy in the region—. Gathering castaña is, in fact, one of the emblematic sustainable activities of Madre de Dios.
Tiny in population but immense in nature, Madre de Dios holds a large share of Peru's biodiversity and embodies, like few other regions, the challenge of reconciling development and conservation in the Amazon.
The Moquegua valley was a strategic enclave where two great pre-Inca empires met: the Wari, come from the north out of Ayacucho, and the Tiwanaku, from the Titicaca altiplano. High on Cerro Baúl, an imposing mesa with almost vertical slopes that dominates the valley, the Wari raised a fortified 'acropolis', one of their southernmost and most singular settlements.
There archaeologists even found an ancient brewery that produced molle chicha on a large scale for ritual banquets, in which the women of the elite had a central role, and which was closed down with a great ceremony when the site was abandoned. This meeting of two cultural horizons —at times in tension, at times in coexistence— makes Moquegua a key place for understanding the Andean world before the Incas.
The region was also inhabited by coastal peoples and by the Coles, farmers of the valley, who drew on the Moquegua and Osmore rivers to irrigate their fields in the middle of the desert, mastering water in one of the most arid areas of the country.
Founded as Santa Catalina de Guadalcázar de Moquegua in 1626, the city prospered thanks to its vineyards, planted in the sunny, sheltered valley. From its grapes came wines and, above all, a pisco of great quality and renown that still gives the region its fame and competes in the major national contests, with artisanal bodegas of long tradition.
Its historic center preserves a unique architectural feature: the mansions with 'mojinete' roofs, gabled and of characteristic triangular shape, adapted to the climate and to earthquakes, alongside a beautiful Plaza de Armas with an iron fountain attributed to the workshop of Gustave Eiffel. The 'city of a thousand mansions' is one of the most singular colonial ensembles in southern Peru.
That winemaking tradition and that colonial heritage make Moquegua a destination where history is also enjoyed in the glass, in one of the calmest and sunniest cities of Peru.
Like all of southern Peru, Moquegua was affected by the War of the Pacific (1879-1883): battles such as that of Los Ángeles, in the heights of Torata, were fought on its territory, and the region suffered the Chilean occupation along with Tacna and Arica. Its closeness to the border and its condition as a land of passage marked its contemporary history.
For much of the republican era, Moquegua was a small, quiet and somewhat remote region, tied to its wine valley, to its port of Ilo and to the livestock raising of the heights of Carumas and Ubinas, with the Ubinas volcano —the most active in Peru— as a reminder of the seismic nature of the territory.
That condition of deep south, between the desert, the volcanoes and the altiplano, gave Moquegua a serene and traditional character that contrasts with its recent economic transformation.
Moquegua is one of the least populated regions of Peru, but also one of those with the greatest economic weight and the largest budget per inhabitant, thanks to large-scale copper mining. To the old deposits of Cuajone and Toquepala was added Quellaveco, one of the largest copper projects in the world, operated by Anglo American with Mitsubishi, which entered production in September 2022 and made Moquegua the country's leading copper-producing region.
Quellaveco, with an investment of billions of dollars and a projected output of some 300,000 tons of copper a year in its first decade, ships its ore out through the port of Ilo bound for Asia, and is an engine of the national economy. The port of Ilo, on the Pacific, is also a strategic sea outlet for the south of Peru and for Bolivia.
That mining wealth, with the environmental and social challenges it brings, has transformed the regional economy and raised the challenge of turning the copper boom into lasting development for its people.
Today Moquegua combines its new mining power with its pisco and wine tradition, its colonial and archaeological heritage, and a valley agriculture of avocados, grapevines and fruit trees. The region has also stood out in educational indicators, repeatedly ranking among those with the best school performance in the country, a notable case in Peru.
Its landscape runs from the coastal desert and the beaches of Ilo to the puna and the volcanoes of the interior, by way of the fertile Moquegua valley and the livestock-raising heights, in a geographic diversity remarkable for so small a region. Cerro Baúl, the pisco bodegas and the colonial old town are its great attractions.
Between the Wari legacy, its mojinete mansions, its pisco, the great copper of Quellaveco and its outlet to the sea at Ilo, Moquegua is one of the most authentic, prosperous and least travelled corners of southern Peru.
Pasco is one of the highest regions of Peru, with its capital, Cerro de Pasco, perched above 4,300 meters, which makes it one of the highest permanently inhabited cities in the world. Its history is inseparably tied to mining: since colonial times, when its extremely rich silver deposits were discovered around 1630, Cerro de Pasco was one of the great silver centers of the viceroyalty and of the republic.
Later, with the arrival of foreign capital at the beginning of the twentieth century —the Cerro de Pasco Corporation—, extraction turned to copper, zinc, lead and silver on a large scale, and the city grew around a gigantic open pit, the 'Tajo', which extends more than two kilometers and nearly 400 meters deep and has literally been eating away at the urban core, in an extreme case of mining dependence.
That activity also forged a strong tradition of labor, unionism and social struggle, with episodes such as the great mining and peasant mobilizations of the mid-twentieth century, which marked the labor history of Peru.
In the puna of the region rises the Huayllay National Sanctuary, or Stone Forest, a spectacular set of rock formations sculpted by erosion over millions of years, evoking animal silhouettes, human figures and fantastical profiles at more than 4,300 meters of altitude. It is one of the great geological wonders of the Andes and has hot springs nearby.
Around it, the Pasco puna unfolds lagoons, bofedales and herds of camelids, and holds Lake Chinchaycocha, or Lake Junín —shared with the neighboring region—, one of the largest in the country and a refuge for birds. It is a high land, cold and luminous, with deep herding and mining roots.
These landscapes of extreme puna coexist, a few hours' travel away, with a radically different world in the Amazonian foothills to the east.
To the east, Pasco drops down to the central jungle of Oxapampa, an area of temperate climate and cloud forests. Its most singular feature is Pozuzo, founded from 1859 onward by Austrian and German settlers from Tyrol and the Rhineland who, after an epic crossing of years through jungles and mountains guided by Father Egg and Baron Von Schütz, settled deep in the Peruvian Amazon.
Their descendants preserve to this day their gabled wooden architecture, their cuisine of sausages and strudel, their music, their dances and their Tyrolean traditions: Pozuzo is considered the only Austro-German colony of its kind in the world, and a curious Central European enclave in the middle of the Peruvian jungle.
Oxapampa, the heart of the region, is also the nucleus of the Oxapampa-Asháninka-Yánesha Biosphere Reserve, recognized by Unesco, and home to the Yánesha (Amuesha) Indigenous people, in a mix of European, Andean and Amazonian roots that makes it unique.
Yanachaga-Chemillén National Park, in the jungle of Oxapampa, protects cloud forests of extraordinary biodiversity, home to the spectacled bear, the cock-of-the-rock, monkeys and hundreds of species of orchids and birds, with sources of crystalline water and hidden waterfalls. It is one of the great nature sanctuaries of the Peruvian central jungle.
Together with the stone forest of Huayllay, the lagoons of the puna and the biosphere reserve, it makes Pasco a region of extreme contrasts: from glacial puna to exuberant jungle in barely a few hours of descent, with a diversity of climates, cultures and ecosystems notable even for Peru.
These protected areas are today one of the region's main bets on nature tourism and on a conservation that can balance its heavy mining legacy.
Today Pasco seeks to balance its old mining tradition —with serious environmental liabilities, contamination by metals and the challenge of the very survival of the city of Cerro de Pasco, whose possible relocation has been debated for years— with nature tourism, the conservation of its valuable ecosystems and the sustainable use of the Biosphere Reserve.
The region keeps polymetallic mining as its main economic activity, alongside high-altitude livestock raising, agriculture and the coffee of the Oxapampa jungle. The environmental health of its population, especially of the children exposed to heavy metals, is one of its great pending challenges.
Between the highest city in the country, the stone forest, the Tyrolean colony of Pozuzo and the jungle of Yanachaga, Pasco is one of the most singular, most contrasting and least known regions of central Peru.
The Piura region, dominated by the dry forest of carob trees and by the Sechura desert, the largest in Peru, was the seat of cultures such as the Vicús (500 BC - 500 AD) and the Tallanes. The Vicús stood out for their sculptural pottery and for exceptional goldwork in gold, copper and tumbaga, whose most famous piece is the so-called 'Golden Venus'. Their location, in a corridor between the Andes, the coast and present-day Ecuador, made the region a crossroads of influences from north and south.
The Tallanes, heirs to that tradition, were a people of fishermen and farmers organized into small lordships, some of them ruled by women —the 'capullanas'—, remarkable for their command of sailing on large log rafts. They traded the prized spondylus —the red shell of warm waters used as a sacred offering throughout the Andean world— and grew native colored cottons.
They were incorporated first by the Chimú and then by the Incas in the fifteenth century, in a region always marked by extreme weather and by the El Niño phenomenon, which periodically turns its desert into an orchard and brings devastating floods.
San Miguel de Piura, founded by Francisco Pizarro in 1532 at the Tallán settlement of Tangarará, was the first city the Spanish established in Peru and in all of South America, shortly before the expedition marched on Cajamarca. After several relocations forced by floods, plagues and attacks, the city settled definitively on its present site, on the banks of the Piura river.
During the colonial period and the republic, pima cotton —one of the finest and longest-staple in the world—, rice and sugar cane made the agricultural prosperity of its valleys, while Catacaos established itself as a great craft center for gold and silver filigree and for toquilla straw hats. The region developed a strong northern identity, warm and hospitable.
Piura is also the birthplace of illustrious figures: in its capital, in 1834, Admiral Miguel Grau Seminario was born, 'the Gentleman of the Seas' and supreme hero of the War of the Pacific, and in the region Mario Vargas Llosa set several of his novels, such as 'La casa verde' and 'La ciudad y los perros'.
The coastline of Piura, with warm sea and sun almost all year round, holds the most famous beach resorts in Peru: Máncora, epicenter of beach and nightlife in the north; Los Órganos, Vichayito and Las Pocitas, with turquoise waters; and the legendary Cabo Blanco, cradle of big-game fishing, frequented by Ernest Hemingway in the nineteen fifties and a surfing mecca for its perfect barreling wave.
These beaches are today the country's great destination for sun, sea and adventure, where humpback whales —which migrate every year to these warm waters— and sea turtles can also be spotted. The Piura north has become one of the most dynamic tourist hubs in Peru, with an intense offering of lodging, food and water sports.
That seafaring calling coexists with a strong artisanal fishing tradition in coves such as Paita, Parachique and Talara, the latter the country's historic oil capital since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Inland, the region preserves a strong northern identity: the tondero and the cumanana —a sung counterpoint of Afro-Peruvian roots—, the marinera norteña, and an intense popular religiosity that reaches its peak in the fervor for the 'Cautivo de Ayabaca', the Señor Cautivo, whose October festival draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over northern Peru and southern Ecuador.
Its cuisine of the sea and of the dry forest is among the most highly regarded in the country: ceviche of grouper and of black clams, seco de chavelo, malarrabia, majado de yuca, and the algarrobinas and custards made with the fruit of the carob tree. Catacaos is, moreover, the gastronomic and craft capital of the region.
Between the sea, the desert and the highlands of Ayabaca and Huancabamba —with their Huaringas lagoons, famous for their healers and their traditional medicine—, Piura unfolds a surprising variety of landscapes, flavors and traditions.
Piura is one of the most populous and economically powerful regions of northern Peru. Its economy combines modern agro-exports —grapes, mango, organic banana, lime, avocado— watered by projects such as the Chira-Piura; a powerful fishing and fishmeal industry in Paita and Sechura; and the extraction of oil and gas in Talara, home to one of the largest refineries in the country.
That drive coexists with chronic vulnerability to the El Niño phenomenon, which in episodes such as those of 1983, 1998 and 2017 (the 'coastal Niño') brought torrential rains, overflowing rivers and catastrophic floods that affected hundreds of thousands of people and exposed the fragility of its infrastructure in the face of the climate.
Between its standing as the first city of Peru, its northern culture, its world-famous beaches and its diversified economy, Piura is one of the great regions of the north, warm in its climate and in its people.
At almost 3,812 meters of altitude, around Lake Titicaca —the highest navigable lake in the world, shared with Bolivia—, some of the oldest cultures of the Andean altiplano developed. The Pucará culture (fourth century BC - fourth century AD), north of Titicaca, left behind remarkable stone sculpture and pottery, and laid the foundations of a long tradition of altiplano societies. On that root there would later rise, already on the Bolivian side, the great center of Tiwanaku, whose influence spread across the whole basin.
After the decline of Tiwanaku came the Aymara kingdoms of the Colla and the Lupaca, who built the imposing chullpas or funerary towers of Sillustani and Cutimbo, cylinders of finely worked stone where they buried their elites facing the lake and the sacred lagoons. These lordships, rich in camelid herds, were incorporated into Tawantinsuyu in the fifteenth century after harsh campaigns.
According to Inca mythology, it was from the waters of Titicaca —or from the Isla del Sol— that Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo emerged, sent by the Sun god to found Cusco, which makes the lake a sacred place tied to the very origin of the empire. On its waters the Uro people built and still maintain their famous floating islands of totora reed, while the islands of Taquile and Amantaní preserve an ancestral way of life and a textile art recognized by Unesco as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
During the colonial period, the altiplano was a strategic corridor between Cusco and the silver wealth of Potosí, and its lands and mines were a center of encomiendas and forced labor under the mita. The city of Puno was founded in 1668 as San Carlos de Puno, following the exploitation of the Laykakota silver mine, whose control unleashed bloody conflicts between factions of miners that forced the viceroy to intervene. Hispanic religious fervor merged with the Andean and Aymara world, giving rise to one of the richest festive cultures in the country.
The eighteenth century saw in the altiplano the echo of the great rebellions: alongside that of Túpac Amaru II in Cusco, the Aymara leader Túpac Katari (Julián Apaza) laid siege to La Paz and his forces took and occupied the city of Puno in 1781, in one of the most intense episodes of the great Andean insurrection, before it was crushed by colonial troops.
Its border location, next to Bolivia, marked Puno as a deeply bicultural region, Quechua and Aymara, with strong family, commercial and cultural ties on both sides of Titicaca. During the republic, the altiplano also lived through intense struggles over land between Indigenous communities and gamonales, which fed the indigenista thought of the twentieth century and authors from Puno such as Gamaliel Churata and José Antonio Encinas.
Puno is known as the capital of Peruvian folklore thanks to the Festivity of the Virgin of the Candelaria, every February: for almost three weeks, close to 170 troupes and some 40,000 dancers and musicians fill the city with the Diablada, the Morenada, the Caporales, the Llamerada and more than a hundred other dances, in one of the largest religious and cultural celebrations in the Americas. Unesco declared it Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014.
This explosion of color and devotion, which blends the Catholic, the Quechua and the Aymara, reflects the vitality of a living culture and of a proud identity. The dances are divided between the 'autochthonous' ones, of peasant root, and those 'of costumes of lights', with masks and lavish embroidery, and their competition turns the city into an enormous open-air stage under the intense light of the altiplano.
To this great festival are added dozens of patron-saint celebrations in towns and communities throughout the year, which make the Puno calendar one of the richest and densest in Peru, with its music of sikuris, pinquillos and brass bands.
The region's great attraction is Lake Titicaca itself and its world of islands. The floating islands of the Uros, woven entirely from totora reed that is renewed continuously, allow the visitor to see a way of life unique upon the water; Taquile, with its famous male weaving; and Amantaní, with its community tourism and its pre-Hispanic temples on the summits of Pachatata and Pachamama, offer an immersion in altiplano life. This lake universe is reached from Puno or from Copacabana, in Bolivia.
On dry land, the chullpas of Sillustani, above Lake Umayo, and those of Cutimbo are essential visits for understanding the Aymara funerary world. The puna surrounding the lake, populated by vicuñas, alpacas and birds, extends as far as reserves such as the Titicaca reserve, which protects the reed beds and their fauna.
Here the traveler finds one of the most luminous and spiritual landscapes in the Andes: the deep blue of the highest lake in the world, the herds along the shore and the immense sky of the altiplano, the stage of a millennia-old culture that remains fully alive.
Puno's economy rests on high-Andean camelid herding —it is the largest alpaca-raising region in Peru and one of the main ones in the world, with a highly prized fiber—, on the farming of potato, quinoa and other high-altitude crops, and on intense border trade with Bolivia, articulated above all through Juliaca, the thriving commercial and industrial capital of the altiplano and home to its airport. That trade coexists with high levels of informality and with smuggling, of which Puno is one of the country's main points of entry.
Mining also carries growing weight: the region produces gold, silver, tin, lead and zinc, with enclaves such as La Rinconada, an informal gold-mining town located above 5,000 meters, considered one of the highest permanent settlements on the planet, and a focus of serious social and environmental problems because of the use of mercury.
Between the richness of its living culture, the beauty of Titicaca and the challenges of informality, smuggling and mining, Puno faces the twenty-first century in search of a development that preserves its extraordinary heritage and its altiplano identity.
The region of San Martín, in the high jungle or rupa rupa of the northeast, was the territory of Amazonian peoples and a zone of contact with the Chachapoyas of the neighboring mountains. Its valleys of warm, humid climate, watered by the Huallaga, Mayo, Sisa and Cumbaza rivers, were settled by communities such as the Lamistas or Kechwa-Lamas, descendants of a mixture of Andean and Amazonian populations who to this day preserve the Quechua language, their dress and their dances, with Lamas as their most emblematic cultural center.
In the heights and canyons of the region, sites such as Gran Pajatén —on the border with La Libertad, inside Río Abiseo National Park— and Gran Saposoa reveal an occupation by the Chachapoyas culture and other pre-Inca peoples, still largely covered by the thickness of the cloud forest.
That double root, Andean and Amazonian, gave San Martín a singular mestizo culture, bound to the river and the forest but with strong Quechua elements inherited from the highlands.
Moyobamba, founded in 1540, was one of the first Spanish cities of the Peruvian Amazon and the historic capital of the region, the head of the 'entradas' into the rainforest and the departure point for missions and expeditions. For centuries the region was a remote province of difficult access, linked by trails and rivers to the highlands of Cajamarca and Amazonas.
Through much of the twentieth century, San Martín lived an intense process of colonization by settlers arriving from the highlands in search of land, later drawn by the opening of the Marginal de la Selva highway (today Fernando Belaúnde Terry), which integrated the region into the rest of the country and set off its demographic and agricultural growth.
That accelerated settlement turned forests into farm plots and towns, and laid the foundations of the agricultural, thriving San Martín of today, but also of the deforestation problems the region still carries.
In the 1980s and 1990s, San Martín was one of the epicenters of the drug trade and the violence tied to coca growing in the Upper and Middle Huallaga, a basin that came to be the country's largest producer of leaf for cocaine, with more than twenty thousand hectares under cultivation. The territory was disputed by Shining Path, the MRTA, the drug traffickers and the security forces, and tens of thousands of people were displaced.
Since then the region has carried out a remarkable reconversion: with the support of alternative development programs, thousands of farmers moved from coca to coffee and cacao —today internationally recognized for their quality, with award-winning cooperatives— and to other legal crops such as oil palm and rice. San Martín became an internationally cited example of recovery after conflict and drug trafficking.
That transition, though uneven and unfinished, changed the face of the region and gave it a new image as a land of coffee, cacao and nature.
Tarapoto, the 'city of palm trees', is today the great tourist and commercial center of San Martín, a base for discovering its many waterfalls —such as Ahuashiyacu—, the Laguna Azul of Sauce, the Cordillera Escalera Regional Conservation Area and the biodiversity of the high jungle, with its rich birdlife and its cloud forests. Its warm atmosphere, its swims in rivers and streams and its nightlife have made it a very popular destination among Peruvians themselves.
Moyobamba, for its part, nicknamed the 'city of orchids', celebrates its floral wealth every year at the Orchid Festival and has hot springs, orchid gardens and viewpoints over the Alto Mayo valley, protected by a protection forest that is key for water and for birds.
Its cuisine of juanes, tacacho with cecina, patarashca and regional sausages rounds out the appeal of a warm and welcoming region.
Today San Martín is one of the most dynamic regions of the Peruvian Amazon. Its economy combines the farming of coffee, cacao, rice, oil palm and fruit; cattle raising; and a booming nature and wellness tourism, with Tarapoto as one of the most visited rainforest destinations in the country. The region is recognized as a benchmark for alternative development and conservation.
San Martín has been a pioneer in Peru in forest conservation policies and in the fight against deforestation, with regional protected areas and reforestation programs, although the pressure on the forest from agriculture and migration remains a major challenge.
With its warm climate, its waters, its exuberant nature and its history of overcoming conflict, San Martín has established itself as one of the most accessible and attractive destinations for ecotourism, adventure and wellness in the Peruvian Amazon.
In the far south of Peru, on the coastal desert watered by the Caplina river and the Uchusuma canal system, Tacna was the land of Aymara peoples and a crossing point between the coast, the altiplano and what is today northern Chile. Its name is thought to be linked to an ancient curaca of the area, and its valley held geoglyphs and petroglyphs such as those of Miculla, evidence of a long pre-Hispanic occupation.
During the colonial period, the region formed part of the area of influence of Arequipa and prospered on the agriculture of its valleys, the vine, the olive and trade with Upper Peru and the port of Arica, its natural outlet to the sea. That vocation as a land of frontier and passage would define its entire history.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Tacna was the stage for early cries of freedom: the uprising of Francisco Antonio de Zela in 1811 is remembered as one of the first pronouncements for independence in the Peruvian south, which even then earned the city a place in the country's patriotic history.
Tacna was both stage and victim of the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), which pitted Chile against Peru and Bolivia over the desert's saltpeter. Nearby, on the heights of the Alianza, the bloody battle of Tacna was fought on 26 May 1880, in which the allied Peruvian-Bolivian army was defeated; after it, Bolivia withdrew from the conflict and the city was left occupied by Chile.
Under the Treaty of Ancón of 1883, which ended the war, Tacna and Arica passed to Chilean administration for a term of ten years, after which a plebiscite was to decide their fate. But the vote was never held, and the 'captivity' of Tacna stretched on for almost half a century, becoming an open wound and a national symbol.
That occupation branded Peruvian memory and turned Tacna into the emblem of the country's irredentism and patriotism.
During the decades of captivity, Chile pushed an intense policy of 'Chileanization' —changing authorities, schools, clergy and symbols, expelling Peruvian priests, pressuring the population— in order to assimilate the territory. Yet the people of Tacna kept their identity and their loyalty to Peru alive, often clandestinely, in an episode of civic resistance engraved in the national history.
Only in 1929, after long negotiations and mediation by the United States, did the Treaty of Lima provide for the return of Tacna to Peru, while Arica remained definitively with Chile. On 28 August 1929, half a century after its occupation, Tacna returned to Peruvian sovereignty amid immense emotion.
For that resistance and that return, Tacna is called the 'Heroic City', and its reincorporation is commemorated every 28 August with the solemn Procession of the Flag, one of the most deeply felt civic ceremonies in Peru.
Tacna preserves a strong civic feeling, expressed in its monuments —the Parabolic Arch dedicated to the heroes of the war, the Alameda Bolognesi, the Paseo Cívico, the historic locomotive of the Tacna-Arica railway— and in the veneration of the figures of '79, such as Grau and Bolognesi. Its museums and its civic calendar keep alive the memory of the war and of the captivity.
Its closeness to the Chilean city of Arica, a few kilometers from the busiest border in the country, made it a dynamic hub of cross-border trade, shopping tourism and health services for visitors from the neighboring country, with a daily coming and going of thousands of people through the Santa Rosa and Chacalluta border complex.
That condition of border city, loaded with history but turned toward exchange with Chile, defines much of Tacna's life today.
Today Tacna is a prosperous, orderly and sunny city, the commercial capital of Peru's far south. Its economy combines cross-border trade, services, an agriculture of valleys and countryside —olives, oregano, vines and fruit— and an important copper mining industry, with the great Toquepala deposit, one of the oldest and most productive mines in the country, in the neighboring basin.
Its surroundings offer the wine and olive valleys of the Pocollay and Calana countryside, the petroglyphs of Miculla, the hot springs and the altiplano landscapes toward the Tacora volcano and Lake Aricota, in a region that combines history, patriotism and development. The city is also an important university center of the south.
Between its heroic glory, its calling as a border gateway and its commercial and mining drive, Tacna embodies, like no other, the Peruvian patriotism forged in adversity and return.
Tumbes was the point where the Inca empire looked out onto the warm northern sea, and from where the prized spondylus, the sacred red shell of the Andes, was traded. Inhabited by the tumpis, a people of fishermen and navigators, the region was incorporated into the Tahuantinsuyo by Huayna Cápac, who raised there an important center with a temple, a fortress and storehouses, like those still traced at Cabeza de Vaca.
Its historical importance is enormous: it was the first land of the Inca empire the Spanish laid eyes on. In 1528, during his second reconnaissance voyage, Francisco Pizarro reached Tumbes and was dazzled by the wealth and the order of the Inca city, with its stone buildings, its temples and its treasures.
That sighting confirmed the existence of the fabulous kingdom the Spanish had heard about, and decided Pizarro to come back and conquer it: the venture that would end at Cajamarca four years later began, in good measure, within sight of Tumbes.
Because of its position in the far northwest, next to Ecuador, Tumbes was throughout the twentieth century a stage, a rearguard and a symbol of the border conflicts between the two countries. The war of 1941, in which Peru occupied positions in southern Ecuador after the combat of Zarumilla, had one of its flashpoints on this frontier, and was settled by the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1942.
Later, the Alto Cenepa conflict in 1995 —in the remote Cordillera del Cóndor— revived tensions, until the signing of a definitive peace between Peru and Ecuador in Brasilia in 1998, which closed one of the oldest border disputes in the Americas and opened a stage of cross-border integration.
That condition of border region, of a 'living' frontier and intense exchange with the neighboring country, deeply marked the trade, the culture and the daily life of the people of Tumbes, with a heavy movement of people and goods across the international bridge over the Zarumilla river, at Aguas Verdes.
Tumbes is the most tropical region of Peru, with a warm, humid climate almost all year round and a natural world that is not repeated anywhere else in the country. It holds the Mangroves of Tumbes, the only mangrove forest in Peru, an ecosystem of submerged roots that shelters the Tumbes crocodile —or American crocodile, in danger of extinction— along with a very rich birdlife, crustaceans and marine life, protected as a national sanctuary.
To this are added the Cerros de Amotape National Park and the Tumbes National Reserve, which together with the neighboring El Angolo game reserve make up the Northwest Biosphere Reserve, and preserve the dry forest and the Pacific tropical forest, home to unique species such as the Tumbes howler monkey, the jaguar and the Andean condor at its northern limit.
That exceptional biodiversity, in the transition between the Peruvian desert and the Ecuadorian jungle, makes Tumbes a singular natural jewel within the country.
The shoreline of Tumbes, of golden sand and warm sea, with resorts such as Punta Sal, Zorritos and Puerto Pizarro, makes it a destination for sun, beach and ecotourism, complementing the nearby beach circuit of Piura. In its waters humpback whales can be spotted in season, along with dolphins and sea turtles.
Puerto Pizarro, among the mangroves, offers boat rides through the estuaries, crocodile hatcheries and a strong fishing tradition of black clams, prawns and crabs, the basis of a tasty and distinctive seafood cuisine. Prawn farming is, in fact, one of the region's major economic activities.
Its coastal people, warm and cheerful, with their music and their food, complete the identity of this tropical corner of Peru's far north.
Today Tumbes lives on fishing and export prawn farming, on the agriculture of its valleys —rice, banana, tobacco—, on cross-border trade with Ecuador and on a growing tourism of sun, beach and nature. It is one of the smallest regions of Peru, but of great strategic value for its border condition and for its natural heritage.
Its position on the frontier gives it a remarkable commercial dynamism, but also challenges tied to smuggling, migration and security, as well as a chronic vulnerability to the El Niño phenomenon, which in its great episodes turns the north into a scene of devastating rains and floods.
Between its historical role as the threshold of the Inca empire before Pizarro's eyes, its unique mangroves and crocodiles, its warm beaches and its status as a border gateway, Tumbes offers a singular and unmistakable tropical corner of Peru.
Ucayali takes its name from the mighty river that crosses it, one of the two great headwaters of the Amazon along with the Marañón. For millennia its jungle has been home to numerous Amazonian indigenous peoples, among them the Shipibo-Conibo, famous for their art of kené: the intricate geometric designs they set down on textiles, ceramics, jewelry and their own skin, inspired by visions, by the course of the rivers and by a worldview bound to master plants such as ayahuasca. Kené has been recognized as Cultural Heritage of the Nation.
Other peoples such as the Asháninka, the Cashibo-Cacataibo, the Yine and the Shipibo also inhabit this region, preserving languages, botanical knowledge and ways of life deeply tied to the forest and the water, in a territory that for centuries remained apart from Andean and coastal Peru.
That indigenous heritage, alive and visible, is today one of the most distinctive traits of Ucayali's identity.
For centuries this part of Amazonia remained almost inaccessible. Pucallpa, today the regional capital, grew strongly from the twentieth century onward, above all once the Federico Basadre highway connected it with the central highlands and Lima in the 1940s, turning it into an important river port on the Ucayali and into the spearhead of the colonization of the central-eastern jungle.
Logging and oil extraction, fishing and, later, agriculture (oil palm, cacao) and trade drove its rapid and often chaotic growth, drawing waves of Andean migrants. Pucallpa became one of the largest cities in the Peruvian Amazon and the economic center of the central east.
Ucayali was created as a department in 1980, split off from Loreto, of which it had historically been part, in recognition of its growing demographic and economic weight.
Very close to Pucallpa lies Yarinacocha, a beautiful horseshoe lagoon —an old meander of the Ucayali river— surrounded by Shipibo communities, the region's main tourist attraction and a window onto the life, the art and the cooking of the jungle. There you can travel by boat, visit indigenous villages such as San Francisco and Santa Clara, buy the renowned kené art directly from the women who make it and get a close look at Amazonian cultural richness.
Nearby are also the botanical garden and the forests of the communal reserve, and upriver the imposing Sierra del Divisor National Park, on the border with Brazil, a sanctuary of cone-shaped mountains and unique biodiversity in the middle of the lowland jungle.
The cuisine of juanes, tacacho, patarashca and river fish, together with traditional medicine and the ícaro chants of the Shipibo healers, completes the rich cultural heritage of Ucayali.
Ucayali faces today the grave challenges of deforestation —among the highest in Peru—, land trafficking, illegal logging and mining and the spread of monocultures, which put heavy pressure on its forests and on the territories of its indigenous communities. Defending the forest has cost the lives of several environmental leaders in the region.
At the same time, Ucayali looks to ecotourism, to the value of Shipibo art, to sustainable cacao production and to its extraordinary biodiversity for a more balanced path of development. Titling indigenous lands and conserving areas such as Sierra del Divisor and El Sira are key to its future.
The heart of the central Amazon, Ucayali embodies at once the cultural and natural wealth of the Peruvian jungle and the urgency of protecting it against extractive pressures.
Today Ucayali is one of the great Amazonian regions of Peru and the main gateway into the central-eastern jungle. Its economy combines the timber industry, the farming of oil palm, cacao and rice, fishing, river trade and a cultural and nature tourism centered on Pucallpa, Yarinacocha and the Shipibo communities.
Pucallpa, connected by road with Lima and by river with Iquitos and the rest of Amazonia, is a strategic hub of jungle trade and transport. The region also has strong potential in the sustainable use of the forest and in indigenous community-based tourism.
Between the great Ucayali river, the kené art of the Shipibo, the Yarinacocha lagoon and the threatened forests of Sierra del Divisor, the region offers one of the most authentic and colorful faces of the Peruvian Amazon.
Áncash was the cradle of one of the most important formative civilizations of the Andes: Chavín de Huántar, a great ceremonial center built around 1200 BC at a crossroads between the coast, the highlands and the jungle. Its temple, with underground galleries, the enigmatic monolithic Lanzón and the tenon heads set into its walls, spread a cult and an iconography —of feline beings, serpents and birds of prey— that symbolically unified a good part of ancient Peru during the Early Horizon. It has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1985.
On the region's coast, the Casma valley preserves even older sites, such as Sechín, with its striking reliefs of warriors and mutilated bodies carved in stone, and the monumental structures of Sechín Bajo, among the earliest in the Americas. In the highlands themselves, after Chavín, the Recuay culture flourished (1st-7th centuries), famous for its richly decorated kaolin pottery and for its stone sculpture, gathered today in museums such as the one in Chavín and the city's 'lithic park'.
Áncash thus combines a deep Andean root going back millennia with a desert coastline dotted with very ancient temples, in one of the longest and richest cultural sequences in Peru.
The heart of Áncash is the Callejón de Huaylas, a fertile valley boxed in between the Cordillera Blanca —the highest tropical mountain range in the world, crowned by Huascarán (6,768 m), the highest summit in Peru— and the Cordillera Negra. Huaraz is its capital and the base of Peruvian mountaineering. But this beauty lives alongside the threat of the mountain: on May 31, 1970, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake tore loose from Huascarán a gigantic avalanche of ice, mud and rock that completely buried the city of Yungay and the town of Ranrahirca.
That catastrophe, the greatest in Peruvian history and one of the worst on the continent, caused on the order of 70,000 deaths and tens of thousands of missing throughout the Callejón, with almost total damage from Recuay to Huallanca. Where Yungay once stood, only a few palm trees and the top of the cemetery were left standing; today it is holy ground covered with rose bushes, and the new Yungay was raised to one side, as a living memory of how fragile life is before the mountain.
Huascarán National Park, created in 1975 and recognized by Unesco, protects its glaciers, snow peaks and hundreds of intensely turquoise lakes fed by meltwater. Jewels such as the Llanganuco, Parón and Churup lakes, or the famous Laguna 69, draw hikers from all over the world, although the retreat of the glaciers caused by climate change threatens this fragile ecosystem today.
With more than fifty summits above 5,700 meters and relatively easy access, Áncash is the capital of mountaineering and trekking in Peru and one of the great high-mountain destinations in the Americas. Legendary routes such as the Cordillera Huayhuash circuit —considered one of the best treks on the planet, immortalized by the book and the film 'Touching the Void'— or the Santa Cruz trails and those around Huascarán draw international climbers and hikers every year.
The Pastoruri glacier, though shrinking, is still an accessible window onto the world of the ice and a symbol of glacial retreat; around it grow the forests of Puya raimondii, the plant with the largest inflorescence in the world, which blooms only once in its life. Huaraz, at more than 3,000 meters, is the meeting point for travelers from all over the world and a base for expeditions.
This nature and adventure tourism, growing fast, lives alongside a strong Andean culture of Quechua roots, with its patron saint festivals and its cuisine of pachamanca, cuy and jamón serrano, which give the region a character of its own and a hospitable one.
Áncash is one of the great mining districts of Peru. In its heights operates Antamina, one of the largest copper and zinc mines in the world, whose polymetallic deposit makes the region one of the country's leading producers and contributors of the mining canon. The activity has brought investment and infrastructure, but also socio-environmental tensions and the challenge of fairly distributing a wealth that has not always translated into development for the high Andean communities.
The Áncash coast, around Chimbote —one of the largest fishing ports in the world in the second half of the 20th century— and Casma, lived through the boom and the crisis of the fishmeal industry and of steelmaking, with the great Chimbote steelworks as an emblem of Peruvian industrialization. The agriculture of the coastal valleys, fishing and industry complete the region's economic map.
Between the glacial puna, the inter-Andean valleys and the coastal desert, Áncash packs an extraordinary geographic and economic diversity into a few kilometers, a symbol of the contrasts of Peru.
With Chavín de Huántar and Huascarán National Park, Áncash brings together two World Heritage sites —one cultural and one natural— in a single territory, something uncommon in Peru. To these are added the archaeological complexes of Wilcahuaín, near Huaraz, from the Wari period, and numerous smaller sites scattered across the Callejón, which make the region an open-air museum.
The memory of the 1970 earthquake is still very present in the life of Áncash and has turned Huaraz and the Callejón into a benchmark for the culture of earthquake prevention in Peru. Every May 31, the region remembers its thousands of victims and renews its awareness of the risks of living at the foot of the country's highest mountain.
Today Áncash projects to the world the image of its snow peaks and turquoise lakes, is establishing itself as the capital of South American mountaineering and seeks to balance its great mining and natural wealth with fairer and more sustainable development for its highland peoples.