By the late 1950s, Lima's original airport at Limatambo, in the San Isidro District, was hemmed in by residential neighborhoods that had grown up around it. The city needed a new gateway. On June 22, 1960, the first international flight touched down at a facility still under construction in Callao, 11 kilometers northwest of Lima's historic center. President Manuel Prado Ugarteche inaugurated it that October as Lima International Airport. Five years later, President Fernando Belaunde reopened it with a modernized terminal designed by architects Carlos Arana, Antenor Orrego, Juan Torres, Miguel Bao, and Luis Vasquez -- a building considered at the time one of the most advanced in Latin America. In June 1965, it was renamed for Jorge Chavez. For the next thirty-five years, the terminal received only minor modifications, even as Lima grew into a metropolis of millions.

The airport's accident record reads like a catalog of aviation's most painful lessons. In 1962, Varig Flight 810, a Boeing 707 from Rio de Janeiro, crashed into La Cruz peak twelve miles out, killing all 97 aboard after what was likely a misread navigation instrument. In December 1987, a Peruvian Navy Fokker 27 chartered by the beloved Alianza Lima football team plunged into the Pacific just before landing -- a malfunctioning cockpit indicator had triggered a fatal sequence of go-arounds. The disaster devastated a nation of football fans. Then in 1996, Aeroperu Flight 603 crashed into the ocean minutes after takeoff because masking tape left over the aircraft's static ports during maintenance rendered its airspeed indicator, altimeter, and vertical speed indicator useless. Peru's internal conflict brought violence directly to the tarmac: a 1991 car bomb by the MRTA killed two and wounded ten, and in 1993, bullets struck an American Airlines plane on the runway.

In 2001, the Peruvian government awarded a concession to Lima Airport Partners, a consortium led by Germany's Fraport, to rebuild the aging facility from the ground up. The first phase, completed in 2005, brought 18 new boarding gates and a shopping center. A second runway and control tower followed in April 2023. But the centerpiece was a $2 billion new terminal, a project delayed repeatedly -- first by the COVID-19 pandemic, then by construction defects and bureaucratic hurdles. The opening, originally set for early 2025, was postponed multiple times before President Dina Boluarte inaugurated the terminal on May 30, 2025. Operations began the following day, after a full suspension of flights to transfer from old to new. By 2022, the airport had already climbed to number 47 among the world's most important air hubs, up from 58th place just three years earlier.

The gleaming new terminal arrived with a conspicuous problem: getting to it. No highway, no metro line, and no public bus route connects the facility to Lima. Access depends on two temporary bridges with no pedestrian walkways, crossing the Rimac River to reach a terminal surrounded by neighborhoods Peruvians describe as crime-ridden. Of the airport's 17,000 workers, most had previously walked to work; the new layout cut off that option. A future Line 4 of the Lima Metro, expected by 2028, will have a station near the old terminal -- but not the new one. The planned Puente Santa Rosa bridge and highway connection remain years away. It is a familiar paradox in Latin American infrastructure: a world-class building stranded by the roads that should lead to it. Meanwhile, the government has floated the idea of reopening the old terminal and connecting the two by monorail, a plan still under evaluation.