Lima — Capital of Peru

Lima was founded on 18 January 1535 by Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador who had just toppled the Inca Empire, and Pizarro named it Ciudad de los Reyes, City of Kings, in honor of the Christian feast of Epiphany that fell near the founding date. The name Lima eventually won out in common usage, likely derived from Rímac, the name of the river running through the city and the Quechua word for a coastal oracle god the Inca and earlier civilizations had worshipped in the valley.

Pizarro chose the coastal site deliberately over the Inca capital of Cusco high in the Andes, favoring easier access to shipping and communication with Spain over the mountain city's strategic and symbolic importance to the conquered Inca state. That decision made Lima the seat of the Viceroyalty of Peru starting in 1542, the Spanish crown's most powerful administrative center in South America for the next two and a half centuries, overseeing territory that at its largest extent covered most of Spanish-ruled South America.

As the viceregal capital, colonial Lima accumulated institutions matched by few other cities in the hemisphere: the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, founded in 1551, is generally recognized as the oldest continuously operating university in the Americas, and Lima's Real Audiencia (colonial high court) and archbishopric gave the city outsized religious and legal authority across the entire viceroyalty.

Lima's historic center, with its dense concentration of Spanish colonial architecture including the Cathedral of Lima (begun 1535, rebuilt after earthquake damage in the 18th century) and the Monastery of San Francisco, earned UNESCO recognition in 1988 as one of the best-preserved colonial urban cores in the Americas, a designation that has held even as Lima grew into a sprawling metropolitan area of well over ten million people around that historic nucleus.

The city sits in a seismically active zone and has been repeatedly devastated by earthquakes throughout its history, most severely in 1746, when a quake and the tsunami that followed destroyed most of the city and killed a large share of its population — a disaster that led to a substantial rebuilding of Lima's urban fabric under Viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco in the following decades.

Unlike most Peruvian cities, Lima sits in a coastal desert climate zone, receiving minimal rainfall year-round despite frequent, persistent cloud cover known locally as garúa — a combination that gives the capital one of the more distinctive climates of any major South American city, arid but rarely sunny for much of the year.

Lima's Miraflores and Barranco districts, developed largely in the 19th and 20th centuries along the Pacific clifftops south of the old colonial center, have become the city's main tourism and dining hubs, a modern counterpart to the historic core that draws most of Lima's international visitors today, reflecting the city's growth well beyond its original 16th-century colonial footprint.

The Plaza Mayor, Lima's original central square laid out by Pizarro at the city's founding, still anchors the historic center and remains the seat of Peru's government and the Archbishopric of Lima, making it one of the few Latin American capital squares to have held the same combined civic and religious role continuously since the 1530s.