Lima: Ruins, Republic, Memory

A coastal capital layered with empire, independence, and reckoning

Six places in the City of Kings, the desert capital Pizarro laid out in 1535 under eight months of fog: the colonial grid that ran an empire from Panama to Patagonia, the catacombs of San Francisco where 70,000 of Lima's dead were stacked in patterns, the seventeen-year war that made Peru the last Spanish holdout in South America, the 1991 Barrios Altos massacre that put a president on trial, and the Larco mansion where one family's collecting mania saved 5,000 years of pre-Columbian art from the looters.

Itinerary

1. Lima — Pizarro founded Spain's South American capital here in 1535, on a desert coast that almost never rains but lives under the garua fog eight months a year. The Humboldt Current keeps it cool and gray; the Nazca Plate grinding beneath it has leveled the center more than once -- the 1746 earthquake killed 10,000 and drowned the port of Callao.
2. Historic Centre of Lima — On January 18, 1535, Pizarro drew thirteen blocks by nine, oriented to the Rimac River, and called it the City of Kings. The grid still holds -- a rectangle of churches, baroque balconies, and republican palaces that governed Spanish South America and earned a UNESCO listing in 1988 for its sheer concentration of monuments. The quincha balconies, lattices of cane and plaster, were built light enough to bend with the earthquakes that shattered stone.
3. Basilica and Convent of San Francisco, Lima — Beneath Lima's yellow baroque basilica, the dead are arranged with a curator's eye -- femurs in radiating circles, skulls in tidy rows. An estimated 70,000 people were buried in these catacombs, the city's main cemetery until 1810, rediscovered in 1951. Above ground rises a Mudejar dome rebuilt in 1655 from Costa Rican timber, said to have no equal anywhere on the American continent.
4. Peruvian War of Independence — Peru was the holdout. While its neighbors broke from Spain in the 1810s, royalist Lima remained the empire's loyal nerve center -- so independence had to be brought from outside. San Martin declared it in the Plaza Mayor on July 28, 1821, but it took Bolivar, the cavalry charge at Junin in 1824, and Sucre's victory at Ayacucho to finish a seventeen-year war. The last Spanish garrison at Callao held out until January 1826.
5. Barrios Altos Massacre — On the night of November 3, 1991, neighbors at 840 Jiron Huanta were holding a pollada -- a barbecue fundraiser to fix the building -- when six masked men of the army death squad Grupo Colina burst in and swept the room with silenced sub-machine guns. Fifteen died, including an eight-year-old boy. An amnesty law buried the case until 2001, when it reopened and became central to the prosecution of President Alberto Fujimori.
6. Larco Museum — It began with 600 ceramic vases and a family's obsession. Warned that looters were stripping Peru's pre-Columbian sites, Rafael Larco Hoyle bought thousands of pieces in a single year and opened his museum on Independence Day, 1926. A century later, an 18th-century viceregal mansion in Pueblo Libre holds 5,000 years of art -- gold worked thin enough to bend like cloth, and the world's largest collection of pre-Columbian erotic ceramics.