Andean republic where Quechua still shares the air with Spanish
Peru climbs from Pacific desert through Andes to Amazon, layered with Inca memory and Spanish colonial cities. Spanish dominates, yet many Peruvians still speak Quechua, Aymara, or other Indigenous tongues across a mestizo, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Asian demographic mix.
Peru stretches from dry Pacific plains over the Andes to Amazon rainforest, covering 1,285,216 square kilometres, third largest in South America, with more than 32 million people and Lima as capital. People lived at Huaca Prieta by about 12,500 BCE, and the Caral–Supe civilisation flourished on the coast between 3,000 and 1,800 BCE, the oldest complex society in the Americas. Andean communities farmed with irrigation and terraces, herded camelids and ran on reciprocity rather than money.
Chavín, centred on Chavín de Huantar, was more religious than political; the Moche later excelled at irrigation, ceramics and metalwork, and the Chimu built walled coastal cities around their capital Chan Chan near Trujillo. From the fifteenth century the Incas of Cusco, once a minor Quechua group, expanded rapidly under Pachacuti and his son Topa Inca Yupanqui to rule between 9 and 16 million people.
Name lore points to Birú, a early-sixteenth-century ruler near Panama’s Bay of San Miguel whom conquistadors in 1522 mistook for the south edge of the New World; Garcilaso de la Vega told a rival shipboard anecdote. The Capitulation of Toledo in 1529 gave the name legal force, and Lima became capital of a viceroyalty where the University of San Marcos opened in 1551. Independence proclaimed in 1821 was secured at Ayacucho in 1824; guano wealth brought stability until the War of the Pacific of 1879–1884.
Mining, manufacturing, farming and fishing drive the economy of 25 regions, and Peru belongs to the Pacific Pumas bloc and APEC.
Source: Peru
