Lima and around Travel Video Guide

Lima and around Travel Itinerary

• Maps and flag of Peru
• Lima and around travel photos
• Lima and around travel forum
• Flights to Lima and around
• Hotels in Lima and around
• Hostels in Lima and around
• Buy the guide book!

Once reputed to be the most beautiful city in Spanish America, Lima today retains some of its charm, despite its rather shapeless expanse of modern suburbs and dusty pueblos jovenes shanty towns that run for many miles in each direction along the Panamerican Highway. Long established as Peru's seat of government, the city is home to more than eight million people, over half of whom live in relative poverty without decent water supplies, sewage or electricity. This is not to say you can't enjoy the place - Limenos are generally very open, and their way of life is distinctive and compelling - but it's important not to come here with false expectations. There is still a certain elegance to the old colonial centre, and the city hosts a string of excellent and important museums, but Lima is not exotic, though the central areas have been cleaned up in recent years - streets swarm with orange-uniformed sweepers - and are packed with colonial relics and twenty-first century features. The pollution and the ever-increasing traffic remain, though environmental awareness is rising fast.

The area immediately around Lima offers plenty of reasons to delay your progress on towards Arequipa or Cusco. Within an hour or so's bus ride south is the coastline, often deserted, lined by a series of attractive beaches. Above them the imposing fortress-temple complex of Pachacamac sits on a sandstone cliff, near the edge of the ocean. In the neighbouring Rimac Valley you can visit the pre-Inca sites of Puruchuco and Cajamarquilla , and, in the foothills above Lima, intriguingly eroded rock outcrops and megalithic monuments surround the natural amphitheatre of Marcahuasi .

Further afield, high up in the Andes, lies the quaint mountain town of Huancavelica and the pleasant provincial capital of Huancayo , which is connected to Lima by El Tren de la Sierra, the highest rail line in the world, which has happily restarted regular if infrequent passenger services. Just over the Andes, you'll find the high Amazon rainforest, the ceja de selva, which you can explore from bases such as the strikingly situated Tarma , hidden among towering limestone crags,

or the small tropical towns of San Ramon and La Merced , at the gateway to the forest. If you're adventurous, you can complete a circuit through the mountains from Huancayo through Satipo , firmly located on the wild jungle frontier, then back to Lima via Tarma. Alternatively, you can travel south beyond Huancayo towards Ayachuco and Cusco, a popular if arduous highland trail, frequented once again after being abandoned between 1985 and 1994 due to guerrilla activity.

Your Tips For Lima and around

• Trujillo and the north Peru Travel Videos
  Peru Travel Itinerary
  Though less known and less visited than the regions around Cusco, Ancash or Lima, the northern reaches of Peru definitely repay the time spent exploring. - Peru
  

• Cusco and around Peru Travel Videos
  Peru Travel Itinerary
  Known to the Incas as the "navel of the world", CUSCO is an exciting and colourful city, built by the Spanish on the sumptuous and solid remains of Inca temples and palaces, and as rich in human activity today as it must have been at the height of the empire. - Peru
  

• Ancash and Huaanuco Peru Travel Videos
  Peru Travel Itinerary
  Sliced north to south by parallel ranges of high Andean peaks, the Ancash and Huanuco areas of central Peru offer more in terms of trekking and climbing, beautiful snowcapped scenery, flora and fauna, glaciated valleys, history and traditional cultures than anywhere else in the country. - Peru
  

• South Peru Travel Videos
  Peru Travel Itinerary
  The south has been populated as long as anywhere in Peru - for at least nine thousand years in some places - but until this century no one guessed the existence of this arid region's unique cultures, whose enigmatic remains, particularly along the coast, show signs of a sophisticated civilization. - Peru
  

• Lima and around Peru Travel Videos
  Peru Travel Itinerary
  Once reputed to be the most beautiful city in Spanish America, Lima today retains some of its charm, despite its rather shapeless expanse of modern suburbs and dusty pueblos jovenes shanty towns that run for many miles in each direction along the Panamerican Highway. - Peru
  

• Jungle Peru Travel Videos
  Peru Travel Itinerary
  Whether you look at it up close, from the ground or a boat, or fly over it in a plane, the Peruvian jungle seems endless. - Peru