Miraflores
Miraflores puts you on the clifftop above the Pacific, walking from park to park past a giant sculpted kiss and a shopping centre set into the cliff face, with paragliders turning overhead.
Things to do
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Plaza Mayor
Best seen from its fountain, Lima's main square puts the cathedral, the Government Palace and the Archbishop's carved balconies around you at once. Take in all three from there, then go inside the cathedral.
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Catacumbas de Lima
Worth an hour of your first visit to Lima, the vaults under San Francisco church hold the colonial city's dead. They lie sorted by family and by bone, some of them laid out in patterns.
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Lima Cathedral
Walk the length of the church to the carved choir stalls beside the high altar, stopping on the way at the tile-covered chapel that holds Pizarro's remains.
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Parque del Amor
Stop here on a clifftop walk through Miraflores for Peruvian love poetry set in tile, a sculpture made for couples to kiss beside, and an open view down to the Pacific shore.
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Parque de la Exposición
MALI, Lima's art museum, fills the old exhibition palace here, so you can pair a ticketed visit to Peruvian art with a free walk round the exhibition grounds outside.
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Government Palace of Peru
A military band and marching soldiers change the guard at the gates of Peru's Government Palace. From the square you get the music, the drill and the long palace front in one stop, with nothing to book.
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Cerro San Cristóbal
Standing on the summit beside the concrete cross, you look out over Lima in every direction below you.
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Circuito Mágico del Agua
The fountains are lit in colour after dark, so walk the circuit as they come on, then finish at the Fantasía fountain for the evening show of music, water and light.
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Malecón de Miraflores
Along the cliff edge from the lighthouse down to Larcomar, you have the Pacific far below and a launch where paragliders run off into the air.
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Museo de Sitio Huaca Pucllana
Between the apartment blocks of Miraflores, you can walk the plazas and passages of an adobe pyramid where archaeologists are still digging, with a guide explaining the walls as you go.
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Plaza San Martín
A bronze San Martín crosses the Andes on horseback at the centre of this republican square, and you come to see him framed by white arcades, balconies and early 20th-century buildings.
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San Isidro
The financial district and the city's leafiest one, built around El Olivar, an olive grove planted in the sixteenth century. The grand hotels are here, and it is the quietest base, between Miraflores and the centre.
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Señor de los Milagros
Come for 18 or 28 October, when the float leaves Las Nazarenas at six in the morning and is carried through the centre until night. Watch from a side street in daylight and carry almost nothing.
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Museo Larco
The finest collection of pre-Columbian art in Peru, in an eighteenth-century mansion in Pueblo Libre: Moche portrait vessels, Paracas textiles and the storerooms open to walk through. The erotic gallery and the garden cafe are the two reasons visits run long.
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Museo de la Nación
Peru's principal national museum, housing the most comprehensive collection of Peruvian art and archaeology from pre-Columbian through contemporary periods. Located in a purpose-built 1990 structure in San Isidro.
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Convento de Santo Domingo
A 16th-century Dominican convent and basilica in the historic centre, built on the site where Saint Martin of Porres lived. Features baroque architecture, ornate cloisters, and notable interior decoration.
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Museo de Arte
A private art museum in the iron-frame neo-Renaissance Palacio de la Exposicion in Parque de la Exposicion, with collections spanning pre-Columbian through modern Peruvian work.
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Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú
Before you fly on to Cusco, give a morning to the Raimondi Stele and the Paracas mantles, the treasures of Peru's oldest museum, in a quiet square in Pueblo Libre.
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Palacio de Torre Tagle
Constructed in 1735, this Rococo palace exemplifies Lima's colonial aristocratic architecture with ornate wooden balconies and period furnishings. Now the Foreign Ministry headquarters.
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Barrio Chino
Lima's Chinese quarter in the historic centre, established in the 19th century and still a functioning commercial and residential neighborhood. Features narrow streets, shops, and restaurants serving Chifa cuisine.
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Basílica de San Pedro
The Jesuit church of 1638 in the historic centre, the richest baroque interior in the city, with gilded altars and Sevillian tiles.
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Mercado Central
Lima's largest public market, a working-class food and produce market in the historic centre offering fresh fruit, fish, textiles, and local crafts.
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Museo Aeronáutico del Perú
Peru's flying pioneers are remembered inside a mock-medieval castle in Santa Beatriz, and their own clothes, photographs and belongings fill the ground-floor rooms. You meet the pilots before the machines.
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Museo Oro del Perú
Seeing case after case of pre-Hispanic gold work is the reason to come, with a world arms collection in the same building. Go knowing that a 2001 review declared thousands of the gold pieces fakes.
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Casa de Aliaga
A mansion on the Plaza Mayor lived in by the same family since Pizarro granted the land in 1535, the oldest continuously occupied house in the Americas. Visits are by appointment through a tour operator.
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El Olivar
An olive grove of some 1,500 trees planted in the sixteenth century, now the park at the heart of San Isidro. The oldest trees are marked.
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Huaca Huallamarca
A restored pre-Inca pyramid in the middle of San Isidro, smaller than Pucllana and climbable, with a view over the district's rooftops from the top.
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Islas Palomino
A rocky islet group off Callao where a colony of some thousands of South American sea lions hauls out, reached by a morning boat past the naval prison island of El Frontón. Operators let swimmers into the water among them.
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Larcomar
A shopping centre cut into the Miraflores cliff so that nothing shows from the street above, with restaurants and terraces facing the ocean. It is worth it for the view rather than the shops.
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Mercado de Surquillo
The produce market a few blocks east of Miraflores where the city's chefs shop, with fruit from the jungle and the coast, and a row of ceviche counters at the back.
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Morro Solar
The headland that closes the Costa Verde to the south, with a cross, a planetarium and the widest view of the bay in Lima. The 1881 battlefield of the War of the Pacific is up here too. A road climbs to the summit, and the haze that sits over the city for much of the winter thins by late morning.
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Museo de Arte Contemporáneo
Lima's contemporary art museum in Barranco, in a glass building beside a lagoon, with Peruvian and Latin American work from the 1950s onward.
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Museo Pedro de Osma
Colonial art of the Cusco school in a Barranco mansion of 1906, with silverwork and painted furniture from the viceroyalty. Small, quiet and a short walk from the bridge.
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Pachacámac
The great pre-Inca pilgrimage centre south of the city, a desert of adobe pyramids and Inca additions covering some 465 hectares, with a modern site museum holding the wooden idol of the oracle. Allow half a day for the site and its museum.
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Parque de la Reserva
The 1929 park in the centre of the city that holds the Circuito Mágico del Agua, with lawns and the Estadio Nacional beside it.
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Parque Kennedy
The central square of Miraflores, known for the cats that live in it, with the artisan market on one side and the district's cafes around it. The Malecón is a ten-minute walk west.
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Playa Barranquito
The small beach at the foot of Barranco's ravine, reached by the walk under the Bridge of Sighs. Stony, with surf schools, and busiest on summer weekends.
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Playa La Herradura
A horseshoe bay under the Morro Solar in Chorrillos, once the fashionable beach of the 1950s and still the best point break inside the city. The old beachfront has faded, which is part of its appeal. It is reached on the Costa Verde road below the cliffs, and the swell runs biggest in the southern winter.
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Playa Makaha
The city's surf beach at the foot of the Miraflores cliffs, a stony strand with a reliable beginner wave and boards for hire on the sand. Locals have surfed here since the 1930s, and it runs all year. Schools along the boardwalk hire out wetsuits, which the cold current makes necessary even in February.
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Puente de los Suspiros
The wooden Bridge of Sighs of 1876 across the Bajada de los Baños in Barranco, the path that runs down the ravine to the sea. Local custom holds that a wish made while crossing it in one breath is granted.
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