Centro Histórico

This guide to Lima's Centro Histórico opens on January 18, 1535, when a local lord named Taulichusco walked out to greet Francisco Pizarro's column with food and shelter instead of the army he commanded. It follows what that hospitality cost him, as Pizarro traced out a new city grid on Taulichusco's own land and raised his house where the lord's had stood. A seventeenth-century visitor called the resulting plaza the finest he had ever seen, more than two thousand feet around.