Peru

Overview

If you love "French Fries" with your burgers, you should know that the potato originated in Peru. The mighty Incas cultivated potatoes in the high altitude of the Andes. There still are thousands of varieties of potatoes in Peru, being only one reflection of it's 'megadiversity'. Peru, the land of the Incas, awaits you with a world of adventure and excitement.

The perfectly fitted stones of this glorious empire continue to be the main attraction to people from all over the world. Machu Picchu , the lost city of the Incas discovered centuries after the last Conquistador left, remains a web of riddles for the adventurer and the scientist to tackle. The Nazca lines, what were they, UFO landing sites or a pathway to the heavens and the gods?

You do not need to be a history buff to enjoy Peru. Of late, thousands of people have dared visit the still as yet unknown Amazon jungle in search of cures for the world's illnesses by tapping into the knowledge of Shamans (medicine men) who may hold the secret to help us defeat the incurable. You can have a reasonably comfortable trip to the deeps of the jungle in Iquitos , starting at the sea side, crossing the Andes, and slowly making your way down. As Iquitos isn't reachable by road, the last to days will be spend on an Amazon Cruise boat. Despite being visited by almost 1.5 million foreigners each year, you can always find a place of the beaten track, where you...more

History

The first inhabitants arrived in this part of the world from Asia about 20000 years ago. They were primarily hunter-gatherer tribes among whose achievements can be attributed the domestication of animals such as the llama, alpaca and guinea-pig and the cultivation of cotton, beans and squashes throughout the regions that are now modern day Peru and Bolivia.

By 1000 BC these tribal peoples began to develop what we would now recognise as a regional culture in art, religion and agricultural methods, but for unknown reasons these began to diversify into individual pockets of expertise. These smaller tribal peoples became experts in their fields and archaeological evidence of their existence can be found across Peru, for example in the Nazca Lines and a series of temples.

From 600-1000 AD the Wari tribe were the dominant and fastest expanding people but they were unpopular with their neighbours despite their cultural development due to their suppression of the ways of those they conquered and the empire fractioned. This left the way open for the Inca expansion of the 1430s in which the Inca people ruled a great swathe of the continent from Colombia to Chile. However, the Inca's suppression of other cultures left them open to unpopularity, and series of civil wars left the empire prone when the Spanish arrived in the 1530s.

The Spanish founded their capital on the coast at Lima, but wars with the native people continued until 1572 when Inca Tupac organised the final Inca rebellion that ended in defeat for the...more