Peru

Cold water from the Southern Ocean flows north along Peru's coast in a vast system called the Humboldt Current. Coastal winds push surface water away from shore, letting cold, nutrient-rich water rise from below and feed huge populations of plankton and fish, making Peru's waters some of the richest fishing grounds on Earth. That same cold water limits evaporation and rainfall, creating the striking contrast of a dry desert coast beside an extraordinarily productive ocean.

The Andes Mountains form Peru's dramatic backbone, with peaks rising more than 6,000 meters and deep valleys cutting between them. Elevation changes the landscape dramatically: warm valleys can lie below cold grasslands and snow-covered peaks, shaping where people can farm, build communities, and travel. Peru's highest peak, Huascarán, rises 6,768 meters (22,205 feet) — high enough to remain covered in snow and glaciers even though Peru lies in the tropics.

The Amazon may be famous for its tropical rainforest, but some of its most distant headwaters begin among the cold peaks of the Peruvian Andes. Snowmelt, rain, and mountain streams flow east and downhill, eventually joining larger rivers in the Amazon Basin. Water that begins among snowcapped peaks in Peru can ultimately travel thousands of kilometers through the world's largest rainforest before reaching the Atlantic Ocean.

Peru is often divided into three dramatically different geographic regions: the costa (Pacific coast), sierra (Andean highlands), and selva (Amazon rainforest). The costa is largely desert but contains most of Peru's largest cities; the sierra rises through valleys and grasslands to snowcapped peaks; and the selva covers more than half the country in tropical forest. Traveling east across Peru can take you from Pacific desert to glaciers to Amazon rainforest.

Peru is home to about 34 million people, but they are very unevenly spread across its deserts, mountains, and rainforest — roughly one-third live in metropolitan Lima alone. The country's population reflects centuries of Indigenous history, Spanish colonization, African slavery, and later immigration from Europe and Asia. Millions of Quechua and Aymara people live in the Andes, while Peru's Amazon is home to more than 50 Indigenous peoples with distinct languages and traditions.

Spanish colonizers brought Catholicism to Peru in the 1500s, but many Indigenous Andean communities combined the new religion with much older beliefs of their own. Pachamama, or Mother Earth, may be honored alongside Catholic saints, and many festivals combine Catholic processions with Andean music, dance, clothing, and ceremonies. Over centuries, these traditions developed into forms of religious life that are distinctly Peruvian.

Most Peruvians speak Spanish, but dozens of Indigenous languages are also spoken across the country. Quechua — actually a family of related languages spoken in the Andes long before the Inca Empire — is still spoken by millions of people, while Aymara is important around Lake Titicaca and many other languages are spoken in the Amazon. English speakers already use several words that came through Quechua, including llama, condor, quinoa, puma, and jerky.

People in the Andes have been making elaborate textiles for thousands of years — long before the Inca Empire. Weavers use alpaca and sheep wool as well as cotton, creating colors and geometric patterns that can identify particular communities and carry cultural meaning. Traditional backstrap looms are simple enough to roll up and carry, yet skilled weavers use them to produce extraordinarily intricate cloth entirely by hand.

The collision of tectonic plates that built the Andes also helped concentrate enormous deposits of copper, silver, zinc, and gold beneath Peru’s mountains. Huge mines high in the Andes extract these minerals for sale around the world, providing a major share of Peru’s export income. But mining also requires land and large amounts of water, creating serious conflicts when mines and nearby rural or Indigenous communities depend on the same resources.

Billions of small anchoveta gather in enormous schools off Peru’s coast, feeding on the plankton that thrives in its cold, nutrient-rich waters. These tiny fish support one of the world’s largest fisheries, with much of the catch processed into fishmeal and fish oil used around the world. But every few years, El Niño can bring unusually warm Pacific water toward Peru, disrupting the cold, nutrient-rich conditions. Anchoveta move or decline, and fishing catches can plummet.

Much of Peru’s Pacific coast is desert, yet some of the country’s most productive farmland lies there. Rivers flowing down from the Andes carry water across the dry landscape, and irrigation channels direct it onto fields producing grapes, blueberries, avocados, asparagus, and other crops. Water that falls high in the Andes can ultimately make it possible to grow fruit and vegetables in a desert beside the Pacific Ocean.

In just six years, from 2016 to 2022, Peru had six different presidents. Peru is a presidential democracy, but resignations, impeachments, corruption scandals, and repeated clashes between presidents and Congress have produced extraordinary political instability. Peru continues to hold national elections, but repeated political crises have left many Peruvians deeply dissatisfied with their government.