Peru
Peru Holiday
When Francisco Pizarro established Peru's capital in 1535, he gave it a regal name: Ciudad de los Reyes, or City of Kings, to honour its foundation on the Feast of the Three Kings. Today's more prosaic name is probably a corruption of Rimac, the Indian name for the brown river that meanders through the city bringing water from the Andes to people and gardens.
Sprawling on a plain 15 km (10 miles) wide between the Pacific and the Andes foothills, Lima usually has a pleasant, dry climate. Evenings are cooled from breezes off the Humboldt current running alongside the coast. But these peculiar conditions also produce a sky that is almost always hazy and grey, and pollution is also part of the picture.
Peru itself is a land of sharp contrasts-the desert plains bordering the Pacific Ocean rise inland to the great heights of the Sierra and snow-capped Andes, and beyond them lie the steaming jungles of the Amazon Basin, where tribes still live as in the Stone Age.
But Lima is always the first stop, and like the whole country, the city is a patchwork of contrasts. It's hardly a stone's throw from industrial dreariness to genteel suburbs and gardens. Potholed sidewalks teeming with pedestrians and peddlers give on to vast green plazas and boulevards with some splendidly baroque old buildings-not too far from contemporary highrises, well reinforced because of a constant earthquake threat.
Dynamic and exciting, Lima is a swollen urban centre from which most of the country's main business is conducted; top economic trumps are mining, metallurgy, oil production and refining, and fish-meal processing. Big industrial plants ring the city. This seething metropolis is home to 7 million people, nearly a third of the country's entire population-a recent influx has stretched the city's capacity and left authorities perplexed by new problems of overcrowding and crime.
Despite rising social problems, the Peruvians-about a half of Spanish or mestizo (mixed) background-are generally kind and open-minded. The other half of the population is pure-blooded Indian, most of whom live in the Andean highlands, farming their communal lands, using old Inca methods and modern equipment.
History can be savoured in Lima's excellent museums, which provide rich clues to a country that traces its civilizations back to 4000 BC. The Spanish Conquest brought its special flavour, but only after it wiped out the Inca Empire-which itself had conquered its neighbours in a methodical sweep nearly as impressive as that of the Roman Empire.
Peru's ruins and relics ignite the imagination, and today tourists come mainly to reach the dizzying heights of Cuzco and Machu Picchu. No superlatives can do justice to this combination-a breathtaking trip into a world of archaeological and natural splendour.