For years Lima was the city you landed in and left as fast as possible for Cusco. That has changed. The capital now sustains one of the most celebrated food scenes anywhere and comfortably fills three or four days.
Ceviche is a lunchtime dish
Worth knowing before you book: traditional cevicherías work with fish that arrived that morning, and many close by mid-afternoon. Ceviche in the evening is almost always a bad sign. The Lima classic uses white fish, lime, ají limo, red onion, sweet potato and choclo corn, served with a glass of leche de tigre, the juice from the marinade. Around it orbit tiradito, sliced Japanese-style without onion, and causa, a chilled terrine of pressed yellow potato and chilli.
Surquillo market, just across from Miraflores, is the best place to understand where all this comes from: dozens of potato varieties, fresh and dried chillies, Amazonian fruits such as camu camu and lúcuma, and food stalls at the back where you can eat very well.
Barranco and Miraflores
Barranco was the seaside retreat of Lima's early-twentieth-century bourgeoisie and keeps its coloured mansions, the Bridge of Sighs and a nightlife that does not depend on tourism. It also holds some of the city's most interesting contemporary galleries and the museum devoted to Mario Testino.
Miraflores is tidier and pricier, with the Malecón running along the cliff above the Pacific — six kilometres of parks with paragliders launching off the edge — and the Huaca Pucllana, a pre-Inca adobe pyramid in the middle of a residential district, floodlit at night.
The historic centre
The old town, a World Heritage Site, is arranged around the Plaza Mayor. The convent of San Francisco holds a library of early volumes and catacombs with thousands of bones arranged in geometric patterns. Nearby are Casa de Aliaga, lived in by the same family since 1535, and the Larco Museum in Pueblo Libre, home to the country's finest pre-Columbian ceramics collection.
The garúa
Lima sits in a desert, yet from May to November a low, persistent sea fog covers the city with almost no rain. Do not expect sun in the southern winter. Summer, December to March, is bright and hot, and that is when the beaches south of the city fill up.