Peru Guide

Peru is the third largest country in South America, roughly twice the size of France.

62% of Peru’s landmass is actually in the Amazon basin. The relatively narrow desertified coastal strip is home to 40% of the population.

Between the two lies the sierra taking up 26% of the landmass of Peru. The sierra is basically the Andes or Andean pleateau so is very high – the average altitude is 3,000m.

This diversity means that Peru is home to 84 of earth’s 104 ‘life zones’.

Peru has converted 13% of its territory into Protected Natural Areas in which live 20% of the world’s birds and 10% of the world’s reptiles.

There are nine national parks, seven national reserves, three national and historical sanctuaries, two reserve zones and an increasing number of forest reserves.

Weather in Peru

Peru’s History

The terrain of Peru is challenging today, let alone in the distant past. Navigating between the three main zones of the country has always been difficult which has limited information exchange and spoken history between peoples.

Add to this impentrable jungle, intense seismic activity and flash flooding and you have an environment in which much of archaeological interest simply doesn’t last.

And then there are the conquistadors…

The lack of written language means that the first detailed written accounts of Peru come from the Spanish chroniclers who were not necessarily terribly subjective.

The Spaniards in turn got most of their information from the previous dominant culture – the Inca. The Inca were an agressively expansionist lot at that time so their oral histories were not terribly kind about their predecessors.

And then there are the looters – a vertiable industry grew up in the 19th and 20th centuries looting archaeological sites to feed the insatiable appetite of European and north American collectors and institutions.

Despite all of this, Peru retains some of the richest precolombian sites in the Americas, including the most
famous of them all, Machu Picchu.

It isn’t just about the Inca though. Peru has been inhabited for around 20,000 years with the earliest evidence of settlements being around 5,000 years old.

Around 2,000 years ago the Paracas-Nazca people were producing the Nazca lines in the desert to the south of modern day Lima.

These 32 giant outlines of animals and abstract geometric designs in the open desert range in size from 40m to over 180m and can only be properly viewed from the air.

To this day nobody knows how or why they were made.

At the same time, some 1,000km to the north, the Moche people were building the great adboe pyramids of the Sun and the Moon in the Valley of Chicama.

Somewhat later the Chimu people built the enormous adobe city of Chan Chan. Around 2 of the original 23 square kilometre expanse of the city still stand.

Peruvian Cuisine

Peruvian food is famously good, not just within Latin America but increasingly worldwide.

The three distinct zones (coast, plains, Amazon) produce a profusion of top quality ingredients. The wonderfully varied ethnic mixture brings them all to life.

It is in Lima that you will find the greatest profusion of high quality restaurants but in fact it is hard to get a bad meal in Peru nowadays.

Even when “walking the Inca Trail”:, Pura Aventura’s chefs produce some remarkably good food!