Lima

Lima served as an important religious center for the Inca before the arrival of the Spanish, and it became capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru during the colonial era.

Before Spanish arrival in the region, the valley in which the city of Lima would be founded served as the location of the sanctuary dedicated to the Inca god responsible for earthquakes. In 1535 Francisco Pizarro established Lima as the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. At the time it was known as the Ciudad de los Reyes (“City of the Kings”). The city housed the residences of government officials, a major cathedral, and the important municipal buildings of the viceroyalty. Most of the architecture of the early city reflected Spanish rather than Inca styles because the city proper did not exist there before the establishment of the viceroyalty. By the beginning of the 17th century, Lima’s native population consisted mostly of several thousand residents, most of them of indigenous heritage and more than a third of them migrants from other areas in the viceroyalty.

Further reading: Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America: Empires and Sequels, 1450-1930 (Malden, Mass.: Bakewell Publishers, 1997); Pedro de Cieza de Leon, The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter, ed. and trans. Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook (Durham N. C.: Duke University Press, 1998); David Collier, Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

—Dixie Ray Haggard