A house built the same year the city was founded is still owned by the same family fifteen generations later, a museum’s ceramic gallery keeps prompting the same question from every visitor, and a set of desert lines etched two thousand years ago spawned one of the twentieth century’s most persistent theories.

Francisco Pizarro founded Lima on 18 January 1535 in the Rímac River valley, naming it Ciudad de los Reyes — City of Kings — for the feast of the Epiphany the founding date fell near; the same year, conquistador Jerónimo de Aliaga built the house in the city centre that his family has occupied for fifteen generations since, on a site that had itself been a pre-Columbian shrine. Lima became the seat of a royal high court in 1543 and capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, the administrative centre for Spain’s South American possessions, and in 1551 it became home to the first university founded in the Americas; the city’s wealth as a colonial trading hub grew its population from roughly 25,000 in 1619 to some 80,000 by 1687, the same year a powerful earthquake destroyed most of what had been built. A second, even more severe earthquake in 1746 flattened the city again and levelled the port of Callao outright, forcing a rebuilding that shaped much of the historic centre still standing today, including the catacombs beneath the Basilica and Convent of San Francisco, built around 1600 and used to bury an estimated 25,000 people until 1810.

Peru’s independence arrived in 1821, when Argentine-Chilean general José de San Martín, after landing south of the city the previous year and blockading it by sea, entered Lima once the Spanish viceroy withdrew and had independence formally declared on 28 July, still celebrated as Peru’s national day. On that same date 105 years later, in 1926, collector Rafael Larco Hoyle opened the museum that bears his family name to the public, its later Erotic Gallery — drawn from his own 1960s research into how Peru’s pre-Columbian cultures depicted sexuality in ceramic form — now the largest collection of its kind anywhere and a fixture on lists of the world’s most unusual museums. Further south, the enormous desert geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines, etched into the ground between 500 BC and 500 AD, drew serious scholarly attention in the 1940s from historian Paul Kosok and mathematician Maria Reiche, only for Erich von Däniken’s 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods? to claim, against all archaeological evidence, that they were landing strips built for ancient astronauts — a theory Reiche herself dismissed as absurd, but one that television documentaries have kept in circulation ever since. Modern Lima has built a different kind of reputation on firmer ground: its restaurants have repeatedly topped global best-restaurant rankings over the past two decades, turning a city once defined by conquest and catastrophe into one of the world’s most talked-about places to eat.