La Punta

This guide to La Punta in Lima opens with the tsunami that struck Callao on an October night in 1746, retreating the harbor first before returning as a wave taller than a four-story building that carried warships inland and left fewer than two hundred survivors. You'll hear why that disaster makes this exposed peninsula an unusually useful case study today, and how scientists have rebuilt the 1746 wave inside a computer to model exactly how the next one would move through these streets. The guide also traces how the rebuilt peninsula became a fashionable seaside retreat filled with Italian immigrants' villas, a third of it now home to Peru's Naval Academy.