As the cradle of South America’s most advanced native American civilizations, Peru has a rich and unique heritage among the nations of the southern continent. It encompasses a past that reaches back over 10,000 years in one of the most harsh and inhospitable, if spectacular, environments in the world--the high Andes of South America. The culmination of Andean civilization was the construction by the Incas, in little more than one hundred years, of an empire that spanned a third of the South American continent and achieved a level of general material wellbeing and cultural sophistication that rivaled and surpassed many of the great empires in world history.

Paradoxically, Peruvian  »» More