Peru
A land of three worlds, coast and Andes and Amazon, heir to the Inca and to great peoples before them, and built on the bond between a people, their mountains, and one another. The complete guide, the forces first.
Peru is a country on the western side of South America, a land of three worlds: a narrow desert coast along the Pacific, the high wall of the Andes mountains down its spine, and the vast Amazon rainforest in the east. Some thirty-four million people live there, most of them of mixed and indigenous descent, and the country holds one of the oldest homes of civilization on earth, the seat of the Inca empire and of great peoples before it. Peruvian life rests on a few deep forces. The first is the Andes themselves and the indigenous root, the world of the Quechua and Aymara peoples and the long memory of the Inca. The second is the bond with the earth and the mountains, the reverence for Mother Earth and the mountain spirits, blended with the Catholic faith into one folk religion. The third is the mixing of peoples, indigenous and Spanish and more, into the mestizo nation. The fourth is reciprocity and community, the old Andean habit of mutual help and shared labour. From these flow a now world-famous table, a calendar of fused festivals, the bright art of Andean weaving, and a warm, communal way of life.
The Andes and the indigenous root
The first force in Peruvian life is the land itself and the indigenous people rooted in it. Down the whole length of the country runs the great mountain chain of the Andes, and in its high valleys and on its cold plateaus live the native peoples of Peru, the Quechua and the Aymara, who number many millions and still speak their old languages alongside Spanish. They are the heirs of the Inca and of the older Andean peoples, and the highlands are their ancient home, a world of thin air, terraced fields, llamas and alpacas, and villages bound to the soil.
Their past is one of the great stories of mankind. Long before Europe knew of these lands, the Andes and the Peruvian coast were home to some of the oldest civilizations on earth and to a succession of brilliant cultures, and at the last the Inca built from the city of Cusco the largest empire the Americas had ever seen, joining a great stretch of the Andes under one rule with roads, storehouses, and the finest stonework in the world. The traveller still sees their terraces climbing the mountainsides, their walls fitted without mortar, and the lost city of Machu Picchu on its ridge.
That heritage is not a ruin but a living root. Millions of Peruvians carry Inca and older Andean descent, speak the old tongue, farm as their ancestors did, and hold the old bond with the mountains and the land. The country is shaped too by its three natures, the dry coast, the high mountains, and the green immensity of the jungle, and the highland indigenous world, set against the more Spanish coast, remains the deepest layer of what Peru is. To understand Peru is to begin in the Andes.
Mother Earth and the mountain lords
From the bond with the land comes the second force, a way of seeing the earth and the mountains as living and sacred. At its heart is Mother Earth, whom Andean people call Pachamama, the living earth who gives food, water, and life and who must be honoured and thanked in return. To her people make offerings, especially in August, her month, burying gifts of coca leaves, maize, drink, and sweets in the ground, and tipping the first sip of a drink onto the soil for her before they drink. The high peaks too are holy, each one a great spirit or lord the people call an apu, watching over the valley below and receiving offerings before a journey or a harvest.
Through all of this runs the coca leaf, sacred in the Andes since before the Inca, chewed and brewed as tea against hunger, cold, and the thin mountain air, offered to the earth and the mountains, and read by village priests to tell what is to come. It is the leaf of the old religion, used in its plain and natural form, a thing wholly apart from the drug that is made from it elsewhere.
When the Spanish came they brought the Catholic faith, and over the centuries the two have grown together into one. Most Peruvians are Catholic, and most of the highland people see no conflict between the church and the older ways: a farmer may pray before the crucifix in the morning and offer drink to Mother Earth the same day, and a single festival may honour a Christian saint and the earth and the mountains all at once. This blended faith, Christian on the surface and Andean beneath, is among the deepest forces of Peruvian life.
The mixing of peoples
Peru is a meeting of peoples, and that mixing is a force in its own right. In 1532 a small band of Spanish soldiers under Francisco Pizarro reached the Inca empire, then weakened by a war between brothers and by the diseases that ran ahead of the Europeans, and within a few years they had toppled it and seized its lands. The conquest was a catastrophe for the native peoples, whose numbers fell terribly in the century that followed, and it bound Peru for three hundred years to Spain, which ruled the whole of Spanish South America from its rich capital at Lima.
From those centuries came a new people. The Spanish brought their language, their Catholic faith, their law, and their towns, and over time the Spanish and the indigenous mingled, and African people brought in bondage and, later, Chinese and Japanese newcomers mingled too, until the greater part of Peruvians were of mixed descent, the people called mestizo. Today most of the nation is mestizo, a blend in differing measure of indigenous and Spanish and more, while large communities remain fully indigenous in the highlands and the jungle, and smaller ones fully of European, African, or Asian stock.
The mixing left its lines as well as its blends. Peru is still marked by an old divide between the Spanish-speaking, more European coast, with Lima at its centre, and the indigenous, Quechua and Aymara highlands, and between the city and the village; and the meeting of the two has not always been equal or easy. Yet from the long mingling has come the whole texture of modern Peru, its language and faith, its food and music, its very face, and a nation that is at once indigenous, Spanish, and wholly its own.
Reciprocity and community
Older than the empires and still alive in the highlands is the Andean way of binding people together through giving and helping, the fourth great force of Peruvian life. At its centre lies the idea of reciprocity, that help given must be returned and that a person and a community are held together by the steady exchange of work and care. Andean people call this ayni: when a family must roof a house, plant a field, or bring in a harvest, neighbours come to help, in the sure knowledge that the same help will come back to them when their own turn comes.
Beside it stands collective labour for the common good, which they call minka, the whole community turning out together to mend a path, clean an irrigation channel, or raise a shared building, work given freely for the benefit of all. Both rest on the ayllu, the old kin-based community of the Andes, a group of related families who hold their land in common, work it together, and have ordered highland life since long before the Inca, who built their vast empire upon these same habits of shared labour.
This communal spirit reaches through the whole of Peruvian life. The family is wide and close, and is widened further by godparents, who become bound to a child and its parents as kin. Hospitality runs deep, a guest fed and a drink shared as a matter of course. And the old bond with the land and the neighbour, the sense that no one stands alone and that what is received must be returned, remains one of the steadiest forces in the country, in the highland village and carried with its people to the city.
The table
Peruvian food is among the most celebrated in the world, and it grows from the same rich mixing as the people. The land itself is a treasure house: Peru is the original home of the potato, with thousands of native varieties in every colour and shape, and of much of the world's maize, along with quinoa, beans, chili peppers, and the fruits of the coast and jungle. Onto this ancient larder came the foods and ways of Spain, of Africa, and of Chinese and Japanese newcomers, until the Peruvian table became one of the great meeting points of the world's cooking.
The most loved dish of all is ceviche, fresh raw fish cured in the juice of limes with onion and hot pepper and eaten with sweet potato and toasted corn, counted the national dish and the pride of the coast. The highlands keep older ways, above all the pachamanca, a feast of meats, potatoes, and beans cooked in a pit in the earth over fire-heated stones, a dish from before the Inca that is also an offering to the earth that gives it. There is the guinea pig, cuy, roasted whole for a celebration as it has been for thousands of years; there are the hearty stews and grilled skewers of the everyday table; and there is the grape brandy called pisco, the national drink, poured into the country's favourite sour cocktail.
Each region sets its own table, the fish and limes of the coast, the potatoes and corn and meat of the mountains, the river fish and fruits of the jungle, and the cooking of Lima in our own day has won fame and honour around the world. Yet behind the celebrated restaurants the heart of it is simple and shared: abundant food set out for the family and the guest, and a drink whose first drops belong to the earth. To eat in Peru is to taste the whole long mixing of the country at once.
The fused festival year
Peru keeps one of the fullest festival calendars on earth, said to hold thousands of celebrations through the year, and almost all of them join the Catholic faith to the older Andean one. The most famous is the Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, held each June in the old Inca capital of Cusco, a great re-enactment of the Inca rite that honoured the sun, once the supreme god of the empire, and now drawing crowds from across the world. In the same way the August offerings to Mother Earth fill the highland calendar, and the planting and the harvest are marked with their own old ceremonies.
Around these turn the Christian feasts, kept everywhere with processions, dancing, and costume. Towns honour their patron saints and their images of the Virgin with days of masked dancers and music, as at the great festival of Candelaria in the highland city of Puno; the whole country keeps Holy Week and Christmas; and Lima fills its streets each October for the Lord of Miracles, the most thronged of all Peruvian devotions. Many of these feasts carry a hidden Andean meaning beneath the Christian one, the two faiths moving as a single celebration.
Music and dance are the soul of every gathering. The highlands ring with the song-and-dance called huayno, whose name means to dance holding hands, carried by the breathy panpipes and flutes of the Andes and the small bright guitar called the charango; the coast has its own graceful courting dance and its African-rooted rhythms; and famous masked and acrobatic dances belong to particular valleys and feasts. Births, first haircuts, weddings, and deaths are all marked with the same blend of church rite and old custom, and the whole noisy, colourful, devout festival year is one of the deep joys of Peruvian life.
Andean weaving and dress
In the highlands the old culture is worn and carried in the hand, for the Andes hold one of the world's great traditions of weaving. For thousands of years, since before the Inca, Andean people have spun the wool of the alpaca, the llama, and the sheep, dyed it with plants and the red of the cochineal, and woven it on simple looms into cloth of startling colour and skill. The patterns are not mere decoration; their motifs carry meaning, recording stories, places, and the order of the world, so that a piece of cloth is a kind of book, and the craft is handed from mother to daughter across the generations.
The weaving is worn, and the dress of the highlands tells at a glance who a person is and where they belong. The women of the mountains wear layered full skirts, the pollera, with embroidered shawls and, above all, hats, and the shape and trim of the hat differ from valley to valley, so that one community is known from another by the cut of its brim. Men wear woven ponchos and knitted caps with earflaps against the cold. Each region, almost each village, has its own colours and forms.
Beyond the cloth, Peru is rich in other crafts: fine pottery in the manner of the old coastal cultures, work in silver and gold, the carved and painted boxes that hold whole scenes of little figures, and the gourds incised with crowded pictures of country life. These arts fill the markets that are the heart of every highland town, where people come to trade, to meet, and to wear their finest. In its weaving and its dress above all, Peru carries its history not in museums but on its back, bright, meaningful, and alive.
Courtesy and the bond
Peruvian manners are warm, personal, and built on the closeness of family and community. Among friends and kin a greeting is warm and physical, a handshake, an embrace, a kiss on the cheek between women or between a man and a woman, and people take time over the courtesies of meeting and parting rather than hurrying through them. Relations are personal before they are anything else, and a matter is best begun with warmth and a little unhurried talk.
The family and the wider circle are the ground of it all. Beyond parents and children stretch grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and beyond them the godparents bound to the family at a baptism or a wedding, a tie taken as seriously as blood. Hospitality flows from this: a visitor is offered food and drink without question, and to share a meal or pass a single cup around a circle, each drinking in turn, is the natural sign of fellowship, its first drops tipped to the earth.
There is a difference of manner across the country's three worlds. The people of the highlands are often quieter and more reserved, slow to open to a stranger but deeply loyal once a bond is made; the people of the coast and the capital are quicker, more talkative, and more worldly. Through all of it runs respect for elders and a patience with the slow unfolding of things. The visitor who greets warmly, accepts the food and drink pressed upon them, shows respect to the old, and does not rush will find the Peruvian welcome, once given, both generous and lasting.
The nation
Peru is the third largest country of South America, a land of three sharply different worlds laid side by side. Along the Pacific runs a narrow desert coast, where the great capital, Lima, holds close to a third of the nation; behind it rises the high wall of the Andes, the homeland of the indigenous highland people; and beyond the mountains spreads the vast Amazon rainforest, nearly two thirds of the country's land yet thinly peopled. Some thirty-four million Peruvians live across these worlds, most of mixed and indigenous descent, and the country has three official languages, Spanish and the old Andean tongues of Quechua and Aymara.
Few lands have a longer human story. The Peruvian coast and highlands held some of the oldest cities on earth and a long succession of cultures before the Inca raised their empire from Cusco; the Spanish overthrew it in 1532 and ruled for three centuries from Lima, the seat of their power in South America; and in 1821 Peru declared its independence, won fully a few years later. The republic since has known both calm and great turmoil, war, dictatorship, and in recent years a rapid churn of presidents, and the old divide between the prosperous coast and the poorer highlands has been slow to close.
Today Peru is a democracy of striking variety and deep roots. Its wealth comes from its mines, among the world's great sources of copper, gold, and silver, from one of the richest fishing grounds on earth, from its farms, and now from a tide of visitors drawn to Machu Picchu and the Inca land and to the celebrated tables of Lima. Beneath the modern surface the old Peru holds firm: the mountains are still farmed as they were, the old languages still spoken, Mother Earth still thanked, the festivals still danced, and the bond between a people and their high and ancient land still at the centre of everything.