THE COUNTRY: WORLDS APART

Peru has what could be called an all-or-nothing geography, nature taken to extremes. Three distinct geographical regions run north to south. On the coast there is a thin strip of arid desert which is surprisingly fertile where it is broken by narrow river valleys. The costa or coastal region makes up just ten per cent of the territory, but is home to about 60 per cent of Peruvians. A broad backbone of brown hills and huge snow-topped mountains fractures the country in two before slipping in the east through rolling green hills of high jungle that drop into a huge expanse of lush rainforest which covers around sixty per cent of the country. Even now, the clear geographical split is also a cultural and psychological one, with most inhabitants considering the costa, sierra (highlands), and selva Uungle) to be different worlds in every sense.

Few countries can match Peru's natural variety. You can travel inland from the coast, where rarely more than two inches of rain falls a year, eked out in a misty drizzle, over mountain ranges topped by snow and slopes pounded by seasonal heavy rains, on to the hot, wet, and sticky rainforest.

An amazing mix of altitudes and climates means that in Peru there are 84 of the 104 known bio-systems in the world. Desert sands, glaciers, and verdant rainforest exist side-by-side. Peru has jaguars, alligators, sea lions, and vicuñas. It has around a tenth of all the known mammals on the planet and more than a fifth of known birds. In the jungle there is the oddly-beaked blazing red Cock of the Rock, parrots in green and scarlet, yellow and blue. Elsewhere, pink-winged flamingos, majestic, circling condors, waddling Humboldt penguins, and flocks of seagulls are just some of the rich bird life. Peru has an estimated 50,000 plant species, including the world's greatest variety of orchids, and an innumerable array of insects. In only three square miles of Manu National Park in the southeastern rainforest, biologists and botanists have recorded 91 species of mammals, 1,100 different butterflies, 600 types of beetle, and 545 species of birds.

Blessings and Curses

Every October in Lima, thousands of people wearing purple tunics crowd the downtown streets to catch a glimpse of the city's most revered image, a painting of El Senor de los Milagros, the Lord of Miracles. Veiled black women carrying silver chalices of smoking incense accompany the icon, which is paraded through the streets on the shoulders of purple-robed men. Some people follow in wheelchairs, others walk backwards or crawl on their knees. Members of the brotherhood of devotees hold crying babies up close to the image. Street sellers carrying purple coat-hangers strung with luminous rosaries and holy necklaces work their way through the crush. Lining the sidewalks are stalls selling turrón, layers of biscuit and sweet manjar blanco, covered with sprinkles.

The cult of El Señor de los Milagros grew out of a deep-seated fear of Peru's natural wrath and unpredictability. In October 1746, this religious image painted by a black slave on a wall in 1651 remained standing after an earthquake devastated the capital, leveling most of the buildings. The mural had already survived an earthquake in 1655, and miracles were attributed to it from 1670. October is still considered the month of earthquakes, temblores as they are known in Peru.

In a country where earthquakes, flash floods, and landslides come every year, it is not hard to understand Peruvians' deep and ancient respect for the gods of thunder and lightning, the mountains, the land, and the spirits who control the earth. Peru sits on a seismic fault. While the Nazca plate buried deep off the coast of Peru shifts as it sinks underneath the continent, it unleashes powerful tremors. This constant activity means that in 1996, Peru suffered 1,652 seismic movements, of which 66 were strong enough to be felt by its inhabitants. The most devastating of that year happened in April 1996, when a tremor virtually flattened the city of Nazca and several mountain villages inland. A dozen people died. The impact of the natural disaster was greater than it might have been because of the inadequacy of the adobe constructions. Earthquake experts said that the older adobe buildings, constructed with thick walls, survived, while the newer ones, where adobe bricks are modeled on the size of modern fired bricks, were too flimsy to stand up to the quake. The root cause of the destruction was that the smaller bricks are cheaper.

Strange Waters

The waters off Peru are special, but the country's unusually good fortune is offset by a curse. Unlike other countries on the same latitude, Peru's waters are strangely cold. The Humboldt current that flows up the coast of western South America from Antarctica keeps water temperatures low. Cold water from near the sea bed wells up to the surface, chilling the sea. This plankton-rich cold current hosts a huge fish population which in turn supports a whirling variety of birds, including pelicans and seagulls.

The curse is El Niño, a current named after the Christ-child, which sweeps down every few years, warming the waters and driving the shoals away. Changes in ocean temperatures brought on by this current turn rivers into torrents of destruction. The advent of El Niño is for fishermen the equivalent of a drought for farmers. It also affects agriculture because it can drive away rain in the south and cause torrential rains in the north.

Land of Plenty?

There are very few crops that cannot be grown in Peru. A walk round any street market will show the exuberance of fruits and vegetables that Peruvians take for granted. There are dozens of different kinds of potatoes, from the meltingly smooth yellow potato to the pink-tinged papa huayro. Peru is home to the potato and Peruvians are potato connoisseurs. Among the familiar apples and oranges are many exotic fruits, from football-sized papayas, knobbly chirimoyas, and orange-fleshed lúcumas to red or yellow mangoes. From the ceja de selva — the high jungle where the sierra meets the selva — there is aromatic coffee and cocoa.

Yet this show of plenty does not mean that the land is without its problems. Although Peru is one of the twenty largest countries in the world, only about fifteen per cent of its land is considered suitable for agriculture or pasture. The lush rainforest conceals one of the most sterile and fragile soils in the world, which has already frustrated development projects, while in the sierra the altitude makes farming on the higher slopes a constant battle. Mountain farmers have to contend with frost, droughts, steep inclines, and increasingly exhausted soil.

There are as many historic reasons as practical ones for this potential farming nation's reliance on food imports, including a general reluctance to eat some traditional sierra produce like the high-protein grain quinoa, a staple associated with the native Andeans. There is no sign that Peru is getting any closer to greater self-sufficiency. Although population growth has slowed from a peak of some 2.4 per cent a year, to 1. 7 per cent in 1996, there are still 400,000 new Peruvians each year. Population growth is far higher in poorer, rural areas than in cities. In 1996, imports of wheat, com, rice, and sugar cost more than $637 million, even though Peru has traditionally been a sugar and rice producing country.

The last four decades have seen Peru shift from being a predominantly rural country to an urban one. More than 70 per cent of Peruvians lived in cities in 1996, compared with 35 per cent in 1940 and 47 per cent in 1961. The scale of the migration, speeded in the 1980s by the eruption of political violence in rural areas, means that cities have grown in anarchic fashion, particularly the capital.

The City of Kings

Love it or hate it, Lima is by far the most important city in Peru. It is now home to nearly a third of all Peruvians and has stretched out into the desert hills on all sides. Far from the tiny city of 69 people founded in 1535 by Francisco Pizarro, who named it the city of kings because it was founded on the Epiphany, sprawling Lima now inspires antipathy among many visitors. British author Nicholas Shakespeare wrote on re-arriving there, "I had forgotten what a vile city Lima was"; the Peruvian playwright and poet Sebastián Salazar Bondy wrote a famous essay, evocatively titled Lima, la horrible.

Lima is a city which has burst its banks, which is out of control, a city where the anarchy born of poverty is on every sidewalk. The sand dunes around the city, now crammed with flimsy houses, are more gray than yellow. Lima struggles with a long winter when citizens complain that the fine fog which hangs over the city means they see neither sun nor blue skies for nearly eight months of the year.

Lima's growth is staggering. From a smart, self-confident city with a population of 1.8 million in 1952, Greater Lima has swollen into a vast metropolis of seven million people, around the same population as a country like Switzerland. Including the neighboring port city of Callao, there are probably more than eight million people living in and around the capital. The main split in Peru is not between urban and rural dwellers, but between those who live in Lima and those who do not.

Along with its growth comes the greatest single change in the last decades – a phenomenon that historians are calling the "Peruvianization" or "Andeanization" of Lima. Andean people have arrived in their hundreds of thousands, fleeing political violence or simply seeking a better living, making the capital reflect the racial mix of the whole country for the first time.

Lima is more than ten times larger than the next biggest city in Peru, Arequipa, and its unchecked expansion has brought a litany of shortages. Water is one of the biggest problems for a capital built in a river valley but surrounded by desert. The Rímac river which attracted the original settlers has only a low water level and is contaminated by the garbage of shanty towns on both sides of its banks. When the rainy season in the mountains is short or when there is a mountain drought, most of Lima suffers water rationing because there is simply not enough to go around. In the younger shanty towns or pueblos jóvenes people often wait days for water cistern trucks to arrive selling water. Thirty per cent of its inhabitants have no running water, 60 per cent of properties are not legally registered, and only a quarter of the garbage produced is properly disposed of.

The capital is short of at least 1.8 million houses and most people have taken the solution into their own hands. The most common move for the desperate and homeless is that of invasiones, where groups of people organize a takeover of unoccupied desert land, where they form their squatter township. They slip in often under cover of darkness with poles and straw matting, ready to mark out their new home in the sand. The police are often sent in to expel these invaders, more often than not violently. The women and children lead the defense with whistles to warn of approaching police. If successful, the new squatter township becomes an asentamiento humano (settlement). New residents give it a name like Keiko Sofia, after the daughter of President Fujimori, hopeful that its lofty patron might protect it.

The outskirts of Lima have not only been invaded by the poor. Rich suburbs have grown up eastwards, heading towards the Andean foothills. While apartment blocks are replacing houses in Miraflores and San Isidro, houses with swimming pools and large gardens are laid out in residential groups on the road to the Cieneguilla valley east of the city. In these smarter new districts, the names of the new roads could well mirror their residents' social pretensions. Some roads have incongruous names like "Inca Golf Course Avenue." In some areas like La Molina, poor squatter towns and rich residencias eye one another from different sand dunes, across the deep economic divide.

Lima's problems are so pressing that it is easy to miss its charm and its historical significance, which goes back beyond Pizarro. Between the smart districts of Miraflores and San Isidro drivers have to take a diversion around a huaca or ancient pyramid that still squats among the suburban houses and ice-cream parlors. There are many huacas dotted in and around Lima, of which the largest is Pachacamac, a pre-Inca and Inca shrine in the Lurin valley south of the capital.

Even after decades of neglect, there is a faded grandeur to the colonial balconies and pastel-colored houses of the downtown and old districts like Barrios Altos. UNESCO has acknowledged the historic importance of Lima's old center by declaring it a "Cultural Heritage of Humanity." The restoration of the Plaza de Armas and the nearby Plaza de San Martin, along with the relocation of many street traders, has started the long haul to restore the older quarters and draw people back to the area. Although there is much still to be done, people are warming to the idea of "recovering" the long-derided city center.

The Coast

The coast is the smallest of the three geographic regions, but it accounts for the lion's share of economic activity. Apart from mining, most of Peru's export booms have started on the coast, with guano (bird droppings used as fertilizer) and sugar and cotton, which were farmed in the great haciendas or estates that grew up in the coastal strip. Since the early twentieth century, oil production has dominated the economy of the far north of Peru, in Piura and Talara.

A little further south, in the Trujillo and Chiclayo area, the fishermen use caballitos de totora, single-person reed boats with sharply pointed tips woven out of the strong totora reed which date back to before the Spanish conquest. Straddling these, fishermen on Huanchaco and Pimentel beach paddle out to sea, using the surf and swell to move away from the beach. The area's agricultural sector is in upheaval after the government forced the 30-year-old sugar cooperatives to become more conventional private limited companies. Newer crops like asparagus and broccoli are proving successful export earners among the agro-industrial estates. Further down the coast, the smell that hangs around the city of Chimbote, heart of the country's fishmeal industry, is enough to tell you what its business is. The industry, one of the country's top export earners, is attracting concern about over-fishing and the practice of swilling waste back into the sea.

South of Lima, the sunny lea valley is Peru's vineyard. Peruvians are more often beer or spirit drinkers, and their wine generally takes second place to the country's own version of brandy, the clear grape-derived pisco, the base of the frothy pisco sour cocktail. Tacna, the most southern city of Peru, was in Chilean hands between 1880 and 1929, when its people voted to return to Peru. The city is a center for contraband, the small-scale smuggling of goods from Chile. However, the steady stream of housewives bringing in suitcases of clothes and electrical goods to sell in Lima's markets has thinned since the government passed special duty-free measures in southern ports.

The Sierra

With its thin mountain air, clay red land, endless twisting roads, river gullies, bright yellow broom, flowering cactus plants, and distant snow peaks, the sierra is harsh and beautiful. The people who live there have to contend with rains, droughts, sharp slopes, and remoteness. Rural life remains simple, with clay adobe houses and many of the same crops that were grown in Inca times like corn, potatoes, ají (hot pepper), beans, and quinoa. Many small farmers keep cuyes (guinea pigs), often together with a few sheep or llamas. Wild vicuna, a gazelle-like wild cousin of the domesticated llama, and alpaca, with finer hair, have been declared the property of Andean villagers who are learning to herd the flocks once a year and shear their fleece.

Like the sharp natural differences of the region, with its bright sun and deep shadows, the Andean people wear clothes that are full of color and contrasts. The women wear bright mantas in which they carry their babies or loads on their backs, while the men have ponchos for the icy nights, usually woven in natural browns or reds, although in some areas brighter colors are used.

With its deep red soil and green pastures, the northern department of Cajamarca is known for its dairy farming and, more recently, for its gold mines. It is also one of the many sites of hot mineral-rich springs famous for their medicinal properties. The most magical contrasts are provided by the Ancash department, with its snow peaks and glaciers, turquoise lakes and tropical flowers. As the sierra marches south it widens and conditions become more adverse in the central sierra that was once known pejoratively as the mancha india (Indian stain) of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac. The terrain on the higher slopes, known as the puna, is a grassland that resists easy cultivation. Indian villagers, growing potatoes, oca, and other highland crops, eke out a modest living with a handful of animals.

The central sierra has also been marked by the mining industry which settled there in Cerro de Pasco. Populous mining towns with their own schools, hospitals, and soccer fields have grown up around the largest prospects, even at altitudes of between 9,000 and 12,000 feet above sea level. Around two-thirds of those who live in the central sierra depend on the Cerro de Pasco mining complex for a livelihood.