Peru lies on the Pacific coast of South America. It has three very different parts: a narrow desert coast, where most people live; the high Andes mountains down the middle; and the Amazon rainforest in the east, which covers more than half of the country. Lima, the capital, stands on the dry coast, where rain is extremely rare.
People have lived here for more than 14,000 years. Caral, one of the oldest cities in the Americas, was built more than 4,500 years ago, and later came the Chavín, Nazca and Moche cultures. In the 1400s the Incas, ruling from Cusco, built the largest empire in the Americas before the Europeans arrived. Spain conquered it in the 1530s, and Peru declared its independence in 1821.
Memories fade faster than photos. Ask these over a meal or a phone call, and write the answers down.
Peru has one of the longest histories of civilisation in the world. Long before the Incas, peoples such as the Caral, Chavín, Nazca and Moche built temples, cities and irrigation canals. The Incas then created a vast empire from Cusco, until Spanish conquerors arrived in 1532. For almost three centuries Lima was the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, for a long time the heart of Spain's South American empire. Peru became independent in the 1820s and has been a republic ever since.
From about 2600 BC, people in the Supe Valley, about 180 km north of Lima, built Caral, with stepped pyramids and sunken plazas. It is one of the oldest cities in the Americas, and the Caral culture began about 1,500 years before the Olmecs of Mexico.
From about 100 BC the Nazca people lived in the river valleys of the dry southern coast. They made fine painted pottery, dug underground water channels that still work today, and drew many of the famous Nazca Lines in the desert.
According to the traditional dates, Pachacuti became ruler of Cusco in 1438 (some scientists think it was a little earlier). He rebuilt Cusco and turned a small kingdom into the Inca Empire, which he and his son spread along the Andes.
On 16 November 1532, the Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro and about 170 to 180 men ambushed the Inca emperor Atahualpa in the town square of Cajamarca and took him prisoner. It was the start of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.
In November 1780, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, an Indigenous leader who called himself Túpac Amaru II after the last Inca ruler, rose up against Spanish rule near Cusco. He was captured in April 1781 and executed in Cusco the next month, but the rebellion went on for another two years.
On 9 December 1824, independence forces led by Antonio José de Sucre, a general of Simón Bolívar, defeated the Spanish royalist army near Ayacucho. The victory sealed Peru's independence and, in practice, ended Spanish rule in South America.
On 24 July 1911, local farmers led the American historian Hiram Bingham to Machu Picchu. The site was known to people in the valley, but his articles and photographs made it famous around the world.
On 8 May 2025, Robert Prevost, a missionary born in Chicago who spent many years in Peru and was Bishop of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023, was elected Pope Leo XIV. He became a Peruvian citizen in 2015 and is the first pope to be a citizen of Peru.
Cook one of the recipes, print the large-print pack about Peru, and finish with the big-screen quiz or the words crossword. Grandchildren can colour the flag.
