Lima

Friday 1st April 1988

Good Friday and April Fool’s Day

We stopped at a huge wayside transport café at 04:00 hrs. and Piers and I studied the map painted on the wall outside. It depicted the coastal Pan-American Highway and it’s branches. A Peruvian, who asked me if I was Portuguese, asked us the usual questions about our travels.

We continued until dawn when we entered the mist enshrouded suburbs of Lima, the outskirts resembling an African shanty town. The buildings improved and got taller as we approached the centre.

Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín Rivers, in the desert zone of the central coastal part of the country, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima Metropolitan Area. With a population of more than 9.7 million and more than 10.7 million in its metropolitan area in 2021, Lima is one of the largest cities in the Americas.

Lima was named by natives in the agricultural region known by native Peruvians as Limaq. It became the capital and most important city in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Following the Peruvian War of Independence, it became the capital of the Republic of Peru (República del Perú). Around one-third of the national population lives in the metropolitan area.

Lima is home to one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the New World. The National University of San Marcos, founded on 12 May 1551, during the Viceroyalty of Peru, is the first officially established and the oldest continuously functioning university in the Americas.

According to early Spanish articles, the Lima area was once called Itchyma after its original inhabitants. However, even before the Inca occupation of the area in the 15th century, a famous oracle in the Rímac valley had come to be known by visitors as Limaq, which means "talker" or "speaker" in the coastal Quechua that was the area's primary language before the Spanish arrival). This oracle was eventually destroyed by the Spanish and replaced with a church, but the name persisted: the chronicles show "Límac" replacing "Ychma" as the common name for the area.

Modern scholars speculate that the word "Lima" originated as the Spanish pronunciation of the native name Limaq. Linguistic evidence seems to support this theory, as spoken Spanish consistently rejects stop consonants in word-final position.

The city was founded in 1535 under the name City of Kings (Spanish: Ciudad de los Reyes), because its foundation was decided on 6 January, date of the feast of the Epiphany. This name quickly fell into disuse, and Lima became the city's name of choice; on the oldest Spanish maps of Peru, both Lima and Ciudad de los Reyes can be seen together.

We stopped and unloaded in a secure yard which was kept locked up until everybody had been reunited with their luggage and was ready to go out into the city. We walked to the central Plaza de Armas, fending off the taxi drivers.

The Plaza Mayor or Plaza de Armas of Lima is the birthplace of the city of Lima, as well as the core of the city. Located in the Historic Centre of Lima, it is surrounded by the Government Palace, Cathedral of Lima, Archbishop's Palace of Lima, the Municipal Palace, and the Palace of the Union.

Troops were keeping the area around the Presidential Palace clear and a crowd with woven palm fronds was gathering on the steps of the huge cathedral. The Basilica Metropolitan Cathedral of Lima and Primate of Peru, otherwise Lima Cathedral Basilica, is a Roman Catholic cathedral located in the Plaza Mayor of downtown Lima, Peru. Construction began in 1535 and completed in 1649. It is dedicated to St John, Apostle and Evangelist. A well-worn armoured car with water canons waited on the corner.

I booked into the Hotel Europa at Jirón Áncash 376. The road that today constitutes the Jirón Áncash was laid by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro when he founded the city of Lima on January 18th, 1535. The hotel was on the Plaza San Francisco opposite another huge ornate cathedral. This was the Basílica y Convento de San Francisco or Saint Francis Monastery.

The hotel was similar to the Gran Casino in Quito, in that it must have been a grand impressive hotel in its day, but now there was an air of decay and the smell of damp. We dumped our bags in my single room and James phoned his parents friends in San Isidrio. A Japanese bloke who spoke poor English answered the phone and after a frustrating dialogue which told him nothing, James slammed the phone down in disgust.

We decided to get a taxi to the address in the affluent San Isidrio district. We paid 150 Intis to ride in a battered Volkswagen Beetle to a posh appartment block with one of those nasty, impersonal intercom security systems.

You ring the bell of the flat that you require, and a faint dalek voice asks you what you want. After a bit of buggering about the Japanese bloke came to the door and explained that he had moved into this flat yesterday.

We managed to track down the owner of the flat and obtain a telephone number. We then found a public telephone box and, luckily, a woman gave us some of the strange, corrugated tokens that were required to operate it.

James rang and got through to Mrs. Davis and got her new address in Miraflores. We jumped into a taxi and soon arrived at a nice house in an area of affluent houses with caged security fronts. We were welcomed in and were given a very welcome breakfast at a huge dining table.

After an hour or so we decided to go back to the centre, taking a bus through the pleasant European-style suburbs and then a battered Volkswagen Colectivo into Lima city centre. I was worried to find that the hotel had “lost” my room key and feared that someone was probably using it to ransack my room. They gave me the spare key and we were relieved to find the room and our baggage were untouched.

James and Piers had a shower and exchanged clothes with each other. They were travelling very light! The soles of their feet were jet black in no time from the bare wooden floor of my room. “That’s OK”, said Piers, “I can rub off the filth on the inside of my jeans”!

They then set off for Miraflores and I collapsed on my bed for an exhausted sleep. At 16:00 hrs. they had relocated my room key and I felt a lot happier about leaving my room. I had a huge Menú in the Macchu Picchu Restaurante, just along from the hotel and then went for a walk around the town.

The Plaza de Armas was packed and so was the European-style pedestrian precinct which ran the length of Jirón Union. I walked around the block, passing the huge, impressive Ministry of Economy and Finance on Abancay, as well as the usual modern multistorey banks and office buildings.

Back on Jirón Áncash the road was blocked by a procession of green-robed people with short dark red shawls waiting to get into the church of San Francisco. The party at the front carried a gruesome effigy of Christ nailed to the cross and clearly suffering.

I went back to my room and watched from the window as the mob filed into church led by a preacher with a megaphone. To the north of the city a prominent hill has a tacky illuminated cross on the top.

I sat down to write my diary and listened to “Rent” by the Pet Shop Boys and “Lady in Red” by Chris De Burgh amongst the Latin American songs on my transistor radio, when I heard English voices from the next room.

I knocked and introduced myself and spent a pleasant evening with two blokes and a girl who had just flown into Lima today from London. We ate in a clean, modern, open-fronted restaurant and then went back to the atmospheric Cordano Hermanos Café on Ancash for Pisco Sours.

The café had round marble-topped tables and a décor of dark wood and mirrors. It resembled an American bar from the 1920’s or 1930’s. The bar closed at 21:00 hrs. and we mucked about in our rooms and strolled around the “fast food” stalls of the Plaza San Franciso, which sadly reeked of urine, for an hour before turning in. It was a quiet Friday night in Lima.