🇵🇪 Peru · The Highlands and the Andes
Tarma, the 'Pearl of the Andes', is a peaceful city in Peru's central highlands, in the department of Junín, known for its mild climate, its gardens and its flower growing, which have made it the 'City of Flowers'. Its national fame comes above all from Holy Week, when the streets are covered with spectacular carpets of flower petals for the processions to pass over, a tradition that draws visitors from all over the country.
Set at about 3,050 meters, in a valley on the eastern slope of the Andes that drops toward the central jungle, Tarma combines Andean air with the closeness of the cloud forest. It was an important place in pre-Hispanic and Inca times and, later, on the colonial and republican route to the Amazon. Today it's a base for visiting the Santuario del Señor de Muruhuay, the Huagapo cave, traditional villages and a landscape of countryside, flowers and mountains.
This guide runs through what to see in Tarma and around it —the city and its cathedral, the Señor de Muruhuay in Acobamba, the Huagapo cave, the village of Palcamayo and the flowering countryside—, the famous Holy Week carpets, how to get there from Lima along the Carretera Central and where to stay and eat. Tarma is a quiet destination, of flowers and tradition, ideal for an Andean getaway close to Lima.
Tarma was an important pre-Hispanic settlement (of the Tarama people) and later Inca, and a key point on the route toward the central jungle. In colonial and republican times it gained importance as a waypoint toward the Amazon. It's famous for its mild climate, its flower growing and, above all, for its Holy Week, with the most celebrated petal carpets in Peru. It's tied to the figure of the Tarma-born politician Manuel A. Odría, president of Peru between 1948 and 1956.
Read the full history ↓The central highlands of the Mantaro valley: setting of the battle that opened the way to independence, land of the Huancas, of the highest railway in the world, of mining and of the coffee-growing central jungle.
Read the history of Junín →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Tarma region was inhabited from pre-Hispanic times by Andean peoples, among them the Tarama, from whom the city takes its name, and the Chinchaycocha, who occupied areas to the northwest, toward present-day La Oroya and the north of the valley, before the Inca occupation. Set in a valley of the central highlands, in the transition between the Andes and the cloud forest, the area was a point of contact between highland populations and those of the Amazon slope, which from early on gave it strategic value as a hub of roads and of exchange between different ecosystems.
With the expansion of the Tahuantinsuyo, the region was incorporated into the Inca empire, which folded it into its network of territorial control and into the roads linking the highlands with the central jungle. Tarma's position, on the descent toward the Amazon, made it a significant point on that frontier between the Andean world and that of the Amazonian peoples, a zone of friction and contact that would keep its importance in the centuries to come.
This pre-Hispanic and Inca inheritance laid the foundations of Tarma's role as a waypoint toward the jungle, a role that would be reinforced during colonial and republican times. The valley, fertile and mild in climate, also favored settlement and farming, foreshadowing the flower-growing, countryside vocation that would later give Tarma its fame as the 'Pearl of the Andes' and the 'City of Flowers'.
During colonial times, Tarma consolidated its importance as a city of the central highlands and the starting point of the routes toward the central jungle and the Amazon. The efforts to colonize and evangelize the cloud forest, as well as interest in the resources of the Amazon region, made Tarma a base and an obligatory stop on that push eastward. The city was thus a hinge between the settled Andean Peru and the frontier lands of the jungle.
In 1784, as part of the Bourbon administrative reforms, the Intendancy of Tarma was created, one of the largest and most populated in the Viceroyalty of Peru, taking in territories as vast as Huánuco, Huaylas, Huamalíes, Jauja, Cajatambo, Pataz and Conchucos, with more than 205,000 inhabitants. That administrative rank reflected the political and economic weight Tarma had reached as a center of the central highlands, far beyond what its present size suggests.
That intendancy status laid the institutional groundwork on which, decades later, the independence struggle in the region would be organized, and it explains why Tarma would play a leading role in the first years of Peru's fight for emancipation.
Tarma holds a prominent place in the history of Peru's independence. On November 28, 1820, at an open town meeting held in the city's Plaza Mayor, the most notable citizens of Tarma swore and proclaimed independence, in one of the earliest emancipation acts in the country, barely a few months after the landing of General José de San Martín's liberating expedition at Paracas.
San Martín had ordered the Argentine general Juan Antonio Álvarez de Arenales to advance into the central highlands to rouse the population against royalist rule. Álvarez de Arenales entered Tarma on November 25, 1820 and, three days later, the oath of independence was formalized, with Francisco de Paula Otero confirmed as political and military governor of the intendancy under the new patriot authority.
Tarma's proclamation carried notable strategic weight: unlike other cities where the royalists managed to retake the territory soon after, in Tarma the patriot cause held firm, and the city became a base of operations for the patriot guerrillas of the center of the country during the following years of the war. For its early and sustained loyalty to independence, Tarma received the title of 'Beloved City' ('Muy Fiel y Muy Generosa Ciudad de Tarma'), a recognition that endures as part of its historic identity.
Through the 19th century and much of the 20th, Tarma kept its role as a waypoint toward the central jungle, while Peruvian politics went through long stretches of instability and military caudillismo after independence. In that national context, the city gave Peru one of its most influential political figures of the 20th century: Manuel Arturo Odría Amoretti, born in Tarma in 1896 (or 1897, depending on the source), who studied at the Colegio Nacional San Ramón in his home city before moving to Lima and entering the Chorrillos Military School, graduating in 1919 with his class's sword of honor.
Odría built a distinguished military career, with a significant role in the 1941 conflict with Ecuador (the battle of Zarumilla), before leading the coup of October 27, 1948 against president José Luis Bustamante y Rivero. He governed Peru de facto and then, after winning an election with no real opposition in 1950, constitutionally until 1956, in a period known as the 'ochenio de Odría'.
His government, authoritarian in style but with a strong populist stamp, drove an ambitious national public works plan -hospitals, schools, stadiums, housing- and significant social reforms, among them granting Peruvian women the vote in 1955. In his home city, Odría left a visible mark in works such as the cathedral of Santa Ana, which today presides over Tarma's Plaza de Armas. At the end of his term he surprised everyone by legalizing the opposition and calling free elections in which he did not stand as a candidate, handing over power peacefully.
The trait that has given Tarma its national fame in modern times is the combination of two elements: flowers and faith. The mild climate and the fertile valley turned the region into an important center of flower growing, supplying much of Peru and earning the city the nickname 'City of Flowers'. That floral abundance is the raw material of its most celebrated tradition: the petal carpets of Holy Week.
Every Holy Week, the streets of central Tarma are covered with spectacular carpets made of petals and flowers, forming religious and ornamental designs over which the processions pass. These flower carpets, considered the most famous in the country, are the fruit of collective community work through the night from Holy Thursday to Good Friday, and they draw visitors from all over Peru, making Tarma's Holy Week one of the most prominent religious and cultural events in the central highlands.
Alongside the devotion of Holy Week is that of the Señor de Muruhuay, a venerated image of Christ painted on the rock in nearby Acobamba, one of the great pilgrimage shrines of the region. Flowers, processions and shrines make up Tarma's identity, a peaceful, bright city that, true to its nickname 'Pearl of the Andes', combines the beauty of its setting with a deep religious tradition and a political history of national weight, in the heart of the Peruvian central highlands.