The history of Peru

Peru is one of the few places on earth where civilisation arose independently. On a narrow desert coast cut by short rivers, and in the high valleys of the Andes behind it, peoples with no knowledge of the wheel or of writing built monumental cities, irrigation systems and states for more than four thousand years, from Caral through Chavín, the Moche, the Nazca, the Wari and the Chimú to the Inca, whose empire was the largest in the Americas. Spanish conquest in the 1530s made Peru the seat of a viceroyalty that ruled most of South America and drew vast silver wealth from forced Indigenous labour. Independent since the 1820s, the republic lived through caudillo wars, a guano boom, defeat by Chile, military reform, and in the 1980s and 1990s a devastating internal war whose victims were overwhelmingly Indigenous peasants. Its politics in the twenty-first century have been marked by economic growth alongside chronic instability.

People reached the Andes before the end of the last Ice Age. Stone hunting tools more than 11,000 years old have been found in highland caves such as Lauricocha and Telarmachay, where hunters pursued deer, vicuña and guanaco. Over the following millennia the peoples of the region domesticated an exceptional range of plants and animals: potatoes and quinoa in the highlands, cotton, squash and beans on the coast, and the llama and alpaca, which supplied wool, meat and transport. By about 6000 BCE villages had appeared on the coast at sites like Chilca and Paracas, and over the next three thousand years settled farming communities grew up at places such as Kotosh in the highlands and Huaca Prieta on the north coast, where early cotton textiles have been found.

The geography of Peru shaped everything that followed. The Pacific coast is one of the driest deserts in the world, but the cold Humboldt Current feeds some of the richest fisheries on the planet, and the rivers descending from the Andes can be turned into irrigated oases. The mountains offered a ladder of ecological zones, from warm valleys to high grasslands, and Andean societies learned to farm several altitudes at once.

In the valleys north of present-day Lima, between about 3500 and 1800 BCE, there flourished what is recognised as the oldest known civilisation of the Americas, known as Norte Chico or Caral–Supe. As many as thirty large centres stood in the Supe, Pativilca, Fortaleza and Huaura valleys. The best known, Caral, excavated since the 1990s by the Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady, covers more than 65 hectares and contains six platform mounds and two sunken circular plazas; its largest mound measures roughly 160 by 150 metres. Work crews built the mounds from stacked reed bags filled with stones.

The Caral people made no pottery and left little art, but they grew irrigated cotton, beans, squash and fruit, and exchanged cotton for fishing nets with coastal villages that harvested anchovies and sardines. A knotted cord found at Caral may be an early form of the quipu, the record-keeping device later used by the Inca. Remarkably, there is little evidence of warfare. Around 1800 BCE the centres declined, probably under pressure from climate change, and the populations moved elsewhere.

From about 900 BCE a new religious tradition centred on the temple of Chavín de Huántar, high in the Andes of Ancash, spread across much of Peru. The temple was threaded with dark, narrow galleries; at its heart stands the Lanzón, a carved granite shaft about four and a half metres tall depicting a fanged deity. Chavín art combined jaguars, eagles, serpents and caymans with human features, and its priests appear to have used the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus in rituals. Chavín imagery appears from the far north coast to Paracas in the south, suggesting a shared cult rather than a conquering state, and the tradition faded around 250 BCE.

On the southern coast the Paracas culture, which emerged by the later first millennium BCE, buried its dead wrapped in astonishing embroidered textiles. From it grew the Nazca culture, which flourished from about 100 BCE to around 800 CE in the valleys of Ica and Nazca. The Nazca built a great ceremonial centre at Cahuachi, made vividly painted pottery, and dug underground aqueducts called puquios, several dozen of which still carry water. They are best known for the Nazca Lines: geometric figures, straight lines and enormous drawings of animals such as a hummingbird, a monkey and a spider, made by clearing the dark surface stones of the desert. Their purpose is still debated. The Nazca declined after about 500 CE, probably weakened by floods, drought and deforestation.

On the north coast, between about 100 and 800 CE, the Moche created one of the most accomplished cultures of the ancient Americas. Rather than a single empire, they seem to have formed several polities sharing a common religion and style. Their great adobe pyramids near modern Trujillo, the Huaca del Sol and the Huaca de la Luna, were the probable centre of the southern Moche; the Huaca del Sol, partly destroyed by Spanish treasure hunters, was the largest ancient structure in Peru. Moche potters made realistic portrait vessels and painted scenes of war and ritual, and their metalworkers excelled in gold and silver. Moche iconography and burials show that human sacrifice, often of captured warriors, was central to their religion. In 1987 archaeologists found the intact tomb of the Lord of Sipán, a ruler buried with a mass of gold and silver ornaments, and in 2005 the tattooed mummy of a powerful woman, the Señora de Cao, was discovered at El Brujo. Severe climatic disruption in the late sixth century, possibly a series of extreme El Niño events, appears to have damaged Moche irrigation and society, though some Moche centres survived for another two centuries.

Between about 500 and 1000 CE two highland powers dominated the central Andes. In the south, Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca on the modern border with Bolivia, built a great ceremonial city. In the Peruvian highlands, the Wari, whose capital lay near modern Ayacucho, created what many archaeologists regard as the first Andean empire. Wari administrative centres such as Pikillacta near Cusco, with their rigid, enclosed compounds, were linked by roads that the Inca later followed. The Wari probably pioneered the use of the quipu for recording information and spread terrace farming, and their state religion may have anticipated Inca beliefs. From about 800 CE prolonged drought weakened the state, and by 1000 its capital was largely abandoned.

The collapse opened the Late Intermediate Period, a time of regional kingdoms and frequent war. On the north coast the Lambayeque or Sicán culture produced rich gold work, before being absorbed by the kingdom of Chimor, the Chimú, which emerged around 900 CE. Its capital, Chan Chan, near Trujillo, was the largest adobe city in the Americas, made up of walled royal compounds, each perhaps built for a ruler and his court. At its height Chimor controlled about 1,000 kilometres of coast and the irrigation canals that sustained it. In the highlands, peoples such as the Chanka, the Huanca, the Chachapoya of the cloud forests and many Quechua- and Aymara-speaking groups formed smaller chiefdoms. One of them, a Quechua-speaking group in the valley of Cusco, would unite them all.

According to Inca tradition, the founder Manco Cápac established the kingdom of Cusco, which archaeologists date to around the early thirteenth century. For two centuries it was one regional power among many. The turning point came in 1438, when the prince Cusi Yupanqui defeated the invading Chanka, took the name Pachacuti, "he who remakes the world", and seized the throne. Pachacuti rebuilt Cusco as an imperial capital, raised royal estates such as Machu Picchu, and began a burst of conquest that his son Topa Inca Yupanqui continued, subduing the Chimú around 1470 and pushing the frontiers into Ecuador, Chile and Argentina. Under Huayna Capac, who ruled from 1493, the empire reached from southern Colombia to central Chile.

The Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu, "the four parts together", was divided into four quarters meeting at Cusco. It held perhaps 10 to 12 million people, though estimates range more widely. The Inca ruled largely through local lords, the curacas, who kept their positions in return for loyalty, while the state moved whole communities, the mitmaq, to new regions to secure frontiers and spread loyalty. There was no money and no market economy: subjects owed the state labour, the mit'a, working state fields, building roads and fortresses and serving in the army, and in return the state redistributed food and cloth from vast storehouses in times of need. At the base of society was the ayllu, a kin group that held land in common. A road network, the Qhapaq Ñan, ran along the Andes and the coast, with relay runners carrying messages and quipu records. Quechua was the language of administration, and the cult of the sun god Inti, centred on the Coricancha temple in Cusco, was the state religion, with the ruler venerated as the son of the Sun.

The empire was at its height when disaster arrived ahead of the Europeans. An epidemic, probably smallpox, spreading from the Spanish colonies in the north, killed Huayna Capac and his chosen heir in the late 1520s, and his sons Huáscar and Atahualpa fought a ruinous civil war for the throne. Atahualpa had just won when Francisco Pizarro, who had sailed from Panama on exploratory voyages along the coast in the 1520s, landed in 1532 with about 168 Spaniards. At Cajamarca on 16 November 1532 Pizarro's men ambushed Atahualpa's unarmed retinue, killed thousands and took the ruler prisoner. Atahualpa filled a room with gold and silver as a ransom, but in 1533 the Spaniards garrotted him after a summary trial.

The Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire depended heavily on Indigenous allies, such as the Huanca, Cañari and Chachapoya, who resented Inca rule. Pizarro entered Cusco in November 1533, installed Manco Inca as a puppet ruler, and on 18 January 1535 founded Lima on the coast as his capital. In 1536 Manco rebelled, besieging Cusco for months, and when the siege failed he withdrew to the forested region of Vilcabamba, where a Neo-Inca state survived for more than three decades. The conquerors meanwhile fought among themselves: Diego de Almagro was executed in 1538, and Pizarro was assassinated by Almagro's followers in 1541.

In 1542, under the New Laws of Charles V, the Crown created the Viceroyalty of Peru, governed from Lima and covering most of Spanish South America. The New Laws' attempt to limit the encomienda, the grants of Indigenous labour and tribute to conquerors, provoked a revolt led by Gonzalo Pizarro, who killed the first viceroy before being defeated and executed in 1548. Indigenous resistance took religious as well as military forms: in the 1560s the Taki Onqoy movement in Huamanga preached that the Andean deities would rise and destroy the Christians.

The colonial order was built by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who ruled from 1569 to 1581. In 1572 his forces took Vilcabamba and he had its last ruler, Túpac Amaru, executed in the main square of Cusco. Toledo forced Indigenous people into new planned towns, the reducciones, to ease taxation and conversion, and adapted the Inca mit'a into a colonial draft that sent tens of thousands of men to the silver mines of Potosí in Upper Peru and the mercury mine of Huancavelica, where many died. Peruvian silver financed the Spanish Empire and flowed across the Pacific to Asia. The cost to Indigenous society was immense. Epidemics of smallpox, measles, typhus and influenza, compounded by war, forced labour and dislocation, reduced the population of Peru by around 80 percent within decades of the conquest, from estimates of 9 to 16 million, part of the wider Columbian exchange.

Lima became a city of churches, convents and the University of San Marcos, founded in 1551, and the seat of an Inquisition tribunal from 1570. Catholic Christianity took deep root, blended in the highlands with Andean beliefs. Enslaved Africans, brought through the Atlantic slave trade, worked on coastal estates and in Lima households, forming the origins of the Afro-Peruvian community. In the eighteenth century Lima's pre-eminence declined as the Crown created the Viceroyalty of New Granada and in 1776 the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, which took Potosí, while the Bourbon reforms raised taxes and tightened control.

Anger at taxes, forced labour and the abusive forced sale of goods by local officials exploded in 1780. On 4 November José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a curaca of the Cusco region who claimed descent from the last Inca and took the name Túpac Amaru II, seized and executed the local official Antonio de Arriaga. His forces destroyed a royalist army at Sangarará later that month, and with his wife Micaela Bastidas, a capable commander in her own right, he tried to take Cusco, but loyal Indigenous troops and reinforcements from Lima held the city. Betrayed by his own officers, he was captured and on 18 May 1781 executed in Cusco's main square after being forced to watch the killing of his wife and son. The uprising spread south, where the Aymara leader Túpac Katari besieged La Paz, and was not crushed until 1782, after tens of thousands of deaths. In its aftermath the authorities banned Inca dress, titles and symbols in an attempt to erase the memory of the Inca, and many creoles became wary of any movement that might unleash the Indigenous majority.

When Napoleon's invasion of Spain shattered royal authority in 1808, Lima became the bastion of royalism in South America. Independence came from outside. José de San Martín sailed from Chile in 1820 with an army organised and financed largely by the Chilean government, entered Lima, and on 28 July 1821 proclaimed the independence of Peru. Royalist armies still held the highlands, and after meeting Simón Bolívar at Guayaquil in 1822 San Martín withdrew. Bolívar, named dictator by the Peruvian Congress in 1824, and his general Antonio José de Sucre won the decisive battles of Junín and Ayacucho, the latter on 9 December 1824, which effectively ended the Spanish American wars of independence. The last royalist garrison at Callao surrendered in 1826.

The new republic was dominated for decades by military caudillos. Andrés de Santa Cruz joined Peru and Bolivia in the Peru–Bolivian Confederation from 1836, until Chilean and Peruvian opponents destroyed it in 1839. Stability came with Ramón Castilla, president for much of the period from 1845 to 1862, who used the revenues of guano, seabird droppings exported to Europe as fertiliser, to pay debts and abolish both slavery and the Indigenous tribute in 1854. To replace enslaved labour, around 100,000 Chinese indentured workers were brought to the coastal plantations and guano islands in harsh conditions. Heavy borrowing against guano and a railway-building programme left the state bankrupt by the 1870s.

In 1879, bound by an alliance with Bolivia, Peru was drawn into the War of the Pacific against Chile over the nitrate deserts of the south. Chile won control of the sea, took the southern provinces, and in January 1881 occupied Lima, which it held for more than two years while Andrés Avelino Cáceres led a guerrilla resistance in the highlands. The Treaty of Ancón of 1883 ceded the nitrate province of Tarapacá to Chile; the dispute over Tacna and Arica was settled only in 1929, when Tacna returned to Peru.

After a period of reconstruction under Cáceres, the years 1895 to 1919 became known as the Aristocratic Republic, a period of civilian rule by an elite of coastal landowners and merchants exporting sugar, cotton, wool and minerals. In the Amazon, the rubber boom brought terrible abuses: along the Putumayo, the Peruvian Amazon Company enslaved and killed thousands of Indigenous people, a scandal exposed internationally in 1912. Augusto B. Leguía seized power in 1919 and ruled for eleven years, the Oncenio, opening the country to American investment and building roads and public works until the Great Depression brought him down in 1930.

In 1924 Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre founded APRA, a mass party calling for anti-imperialism and the integration of Indigenous Peru, while José Carlos Mariátegui founded the Socialist Party in 1928. For decades APRA and the army were bitter enemies. After an APRA uprising in Trujillo in 1932 the military executed large numbers of its supporters, and the party was banned for long periods. General Manuel Odría ruled as dictator from 1948 to 1956. In 1941 Peru fought a short war with Ecuador over the Amazon border, settled in Peru's favour by the Rio Protocol of 1942, though the dispute flared again until a final agreement in 1998. Meanwhile highland migrants poured into Lima, whose shantytowns grew enormously from the 1950s, and peasant movements in the highlands began to seize land.

In 1968 General Juan Velasco Alvarado overthrew President Fernando Belaúnde and launched a self-styled revolution from above. His government nationalised oil, mining and fishing companies and banks, and carried out one of the most sweeping land reforms in Latin America, breaking up the great haciendas into co-operatives. It also recognised Quechua as an official language in 1975. Economic difficulties led General Francisco Morales Bermúdez to replace Velasco in 1975, and the military handed power back to civilians after a new constitution in 1979.

On 17 May 1980, the eve of the first elections in seventeen years, the Shining Path, a Maoist party founded by the philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho, burned ballot boxes in the village of Chuschi and declared a people's war. Drawing on the ideas of Mao Zedong, it sought to destroy the state through a rural insurgency, killing local officials, community leaders and peasants who resisted. The government of Belaúnde, back in power, declared emergency zones and handed them to the armed forces, which responded with massacres, torture and disappearances, as at Accomarca in 1985. The Shining Path itself killed 69 villagers at Lucanamarca in 1983. A second guerrilla group, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), began operations in 1982. Under Alan García's APRA government from 1985, hyperinflation reached about 7,600 percent in 1990, and the violence spread to Lima.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created in 2001 and chaired by Salomón Lerner Febres, reported in August 2003 that an estimated 69,280 people had died or disappeared between 1980 and 2000, the deadliest conflict in Peru's history as an independent state. It attributed about 54 percent of the deaths to the Shining Path, about 37 percent to state forces and about 1.5 percent to the MRTA. Three-quarters of the victims spoke Quechua or another Indigenous language as their mother tongue, although such speakers made up only about 16 percent of the population; Ayacucho alone accounted for about 45 percent of the victims, and most were rural peasants. Some critics accused the report of bias against the military, and a 2019 study argued for a lower toll. Peasant self-defence patrols, the rondas campesinas, played a major part in turning the countryside against the insurgents.

Alberto Fujimori, an agronomist and university rector of Japanese descent, won the presidency in 1990 as an outsider. His drastic austerity programme, the Fujishock, brought inflation down to 139 percent in 1991 and opened the economy to privatisation and foreign investment. On 5 April 1992, with military backing, he closed Congress and suspended the judiciary in a self-coup, widely condemned abroad but popular at home, and a new constitution followed in 1993. On 12 September 1992 a police intelligence unit captured Guzmán in Lima, and the Shining Path rapidly declined; Guzmán died in prison in 2021. The 1996–97 seizure of the Japanese ambassador's residence by the MRTA ended in a military assault that effectively destroyed that group. The regime's methods included a death squad, the Grupo Colina, responsible for the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres, while a sterilisation campaign in the late 1990s subjected many thousands of mostly poor Indigenous women to sterilisation, often without informed consent.

Fujimori won a disputed third term in 2000, but videos showing his intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos bribing politicians brought down the regime. Fujimori fled to Japan and resigned by fax in November 2000, and Congress removed him. Extradited from Chile in 2007, he was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison for human rights crimes. Pardoned in 2017, he had the pardon annulled and later reinstated, was released in December 2023 and died in September 2024.

Under Valentín Paniagua's interim government and the elected presidents Alejandro Toledo from 2001, Alan García again from 2006 and Ollanta Humala from 2011, Peru enjoyed rapid growth driven by mining exports, and poverty fell substantially. Political trust did not keep pace. The Brazilian Odebrecht bribery scandal implicated several former presidents, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, elected in 2016, resigned in 2018 amid corruption allegations. His successor, Martín Vizcarra, dissolved Congress in 2019 and was himself removed by Congress in November 2020; protests against his replacement, Manuel Merino, in which two young men were killed, forced Merino out after five days. The COVID-19 pandemic struck Peru with one of the world's highest death rates.

In 2021 Pedro Castillo, a rural schoolteacher from the northern highlands, narrowly won the presidency over Keiko Fujimori, the former president's daughter. On 7 December 2022, facing an impeachment vote, Castillo announced the dissolution of Congress; the armed forces and his own ministers refused to follow him, Congress removed him and he was arrested. Vice-President Dina Boluarte succeeded him, and protests, strongest in the Indigenous and rural south, were met with force that left more than 60 people dead, including 17 civilians killed in Juliaca in January 2023. Congress removed Boluarte in October 2025 and her successor, José Jerí, in February 2026, leaving José María Balcázar as interim president.

The general election of April 2026, held alongside the restoration of a two-chamber Congress, went to a run-off on 7 June between Keiko Fujimori and the left-wing candidate Roberto Sánchez. Fujimori won by about 50,000 votes out of more than 18 million; Sánchez refused to recognise the result, though OAS and EU observers reported no significant irregularities. She was sworn in on 28 July 2026, the anniversary of independence. Peru today has about 34 million people, among them millions of Quechua and Aymara speakers, the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon and the descendants of Spanish, African and Asian migrants.