Getting to know Lima

After a short night and our second day in Lima, I was looking forward for our tour in Lima, or how the Spanish conqueror (conquistador) Francisco Pizarro called “Ciudad de los Reyes” (City of Kings). Sadly the city was shrouded in a mist and it felt like it would begin to rain, but this didn’t stop us, and we started our tour around the city. My first impressions of Lima were that it is an excited, noisy, large and polluted city.

The first place we visited was the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú (National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology, and History of Perú), in the Plaza Bolivar. This museum had an outstanding collection of pottery and textiles from all the main cultures of ancient Perú. Is an enjoyable museum that covers Peruvian civilization from prehistoric times to the colonial and republican periods. All cultures in the Peruvian civilization are exhibited in a chronological and didactic way. Artifacts from pre-Inca Perú include stone tools carved some 8,000 years ago. The collection of pottery is exquisite, with good descriptions of the stylistic characteristics of each, but not all the exhibits are labeled in English, so you might want to hire a guide.

Next, we visited San Francisco Monastery, one of the most remarkable of Spanish colonial buildings, notable for its baroque architecture. It counts with an extensive old library with a collection of thousands of historical antique books. The Monastery it’s extraordinary, very peaceful, which in my opinion it’s due to the harmonious architectural style, which it’s intricately geometric.

Just down the San Francisco Monastery we saw the Plaza Mayor (Plaza de Armas) was called the “heart” of the city, the plaza its standing in the middle of a spacious square, with a magnificent bronze fountain that stands out. On the north side of The Plaza Mayor is the Government Palace, also known as the Presidential Palace, and the oldest building in The Plaza de Armas is the Cathedral, Lima’s Cathedral is immense, but it’s not that stunning. I think that the interior of San Francisco Monastery is much more extraordinary. What was interested in this Cathedral was that we saw the tomb of Francisco Pizarro, the great conquistador who conquered the Inca Empire for the King of Castilla.

After our tour we had lunch in a typical “Polleria” (Pollo a la Brasa) that was located in the mall near our hotel. Polleria its Peruvian wood rotisserie chicken. The Rotisserie Chicken was served with french fries and salad. I also tried the “Chicha Morada” made from purple corm and my first “Pisco Sour.” Pisco is a regional brandy made of Muscat grapes and is a traditional drink of Peru.