Lima stacks four thousand years in one basin: Lima-culture pyramids under apartment blocks, an Inca oracle in the southern desert, and a viceregal capital whose churches sit on 25,000 bones. Three days follows that sequence in order.
The great coastal oracle, consulted from around 200 AD until Hernando Pizarro's men looted it in 1533. Adobe pyramids and the Inca Temple of the Sun spread over 465 hectares; the 2016 site museum holds the carved Pachacamac idol.
An 1,800-year-old Lima-culture adobe pyramid wedged between San Isidro's apartment towers. A restored ramp climbs to the flat summit overlooking the banking district, and the small museum displays mummy bundles excavated from inside the mound.
Peru's oldest museum, founded 1822, occupying the Pueblo Libre mansion where both San Martín and Bolívar lodged. The Raimondi Stele and the Tello Obelisk from Chavín stand here, alongside Paracas textiles and Wari ceramics.
An 18th-century mansion built over a 7th-century pyramid, holding 45,000 catalogued vessels covering 5,000 years. Entry S/45; the open storerooms let you walk rows of Moche portrait pots normally hidden from visitors.
Baroque complex completed in 1674 that rode out the 1746 earthquake that flattened most of Lima. Moorish-tiled cloisters and a library of 25,000 parchment volumes sit directly above catacombs holding an estimated 25,000 burials.
Pizarro traced this square in January 1535; the bronze fountain of 1651 is the only original element left standing. The changing of the guard at the presidential palace runs at noon, performed by the Húsares de Junín in red and blue.
An 1872 iron-and-stone palace built for Lima's international exhibition, later occupied as barracks during the Chilean occupation of 1881. Inside, three millennia of Peruvian art run as one chronological loop across 17 rooms.
Inaugurated in 1921 for the centenary of independence. The Madre Patria statue wears a llama on her head because the Spanish foundry read the commissioned 'llama de libertad' — flame — as the animal, and nobody has corrected it since.
The largest fortress Spain built in the Americas, begun in 1747 after repeated pirate raids on the port. Its pentagonal walls and the King and Queen towers held out as the last royalist stronghold in South America until January 1826.
Chinese labourers began arriving in 1849 to replace slave workers on the coastal plantations and settled around Calle Capón. The 1971 paifang arch marks the entrance to the oldest Chinatown in the Americas and its founding chifa kitchens.
Lima's first civil cemetery, opened 1808 on Bourbon sanitary orders that banned burials inside churches. Its 766 mausoleums and Carrara marble sculpture hold presidents, writers and Pacific War officers along numbered avenues.
A wooden bridge of 1876 spanning the ravine that fishermen climbed up from the beach. Barranco was Lima's seaside resort before the 1940s, and the republican casonas along the Bajada de Baños keep their tiled façades and shutters.