Lima

The currency is the sol (PEN, S/), with notes from 10 to 200 and coins of 1, 2 and 5. In 2026 it hovers around 3.4–3.8 to the dollar and 4.0–4.4 to the euro. For food, count on coffee at S/8–15, a menú del día with starter, main and a drink at S/12–25, ceviche at a neighborhood cevichería at S/30–55, beer at S/10–18 and a pisco sour at S/25–40. For everything else, a short ride-hailing trip runs S/12–25, a hostel S/40–80, a mid-range hotel S/250–450 and a tasting dinner at a world's-best-list restaurant S/700–1,200 per person with wine pairing. The usual tip is 10%, but many restaurants already add a 10% “servicio” to the bill, so check before adding another. Cards work without friction in Miraflores, San Isidro and Barranco, while markets, street carts, combis and neighborhood cevicherías deal in cash. Yape and Plin, the QR payments by phone, are everywhere, even at street stalls, but they generally require a Peruvian bank account, so don't count on them. Change money at registered exchange houses or with the accredited money changers in vests in Miraflores and San Isidro, and avoid the airport exchange. The 18% IGV is already built into prices, but on lodging at a registered hotel, foreigners staying up to 60 days are exempt from it.

Jorge Chávez Airport, 12 km from downtown, new terminal since 2025

Jorge Chávez International Airport is in Callao, about 12 km from the historic center and 17 km from Miraflores. Since June 1, 2025 it has operated from a new terminal, with a second runway. There's no train to the airport, because the rail link depends on a branch of the Line 2/4 works, still under construction in 2026. The authorized taxi from the counter inside the terminal and ride-hailing cars cost S/50–90 depending on the time of day. The Airport Express bus runs to Miraflores for about US$12 and takes 40 to 70 minutes. Don't accept a driver who approaches you at the arrivals door, however organized the pitch looks.

Three systems that don't talk to each other

Within the city, the metro, the Metropolitano and buses don't talk to each other, and that's the most useful piece of information for the first day. The metro's Line 1 is elevated, runs 34.6 km with 26 stations between Villa El Salvador and Bayóvar, opened between 2011 and 2012 and was extended in 2014, and charges S/1.50 a ride with a rechargeable card bought at the station. The Metropolitano is a BRT in an exclusive lane along the Vía Expresa, from Naranjal in the north to Matellini in Chorrillos, with a trunk fare of S/3.20 and an integrated fare of S/3.50 in 2026, and it has its own card, which doesn't work on the metro. The buses come in two types: the corridor routes (blue along Av. Arequipa and Tacna, red along Javier Prado, and purple) and the informal combis and custers, which stop anywhere and only take cash. Line 2, underground and running east-west, has been under construction since 2014 and has been opening stretches since December 2023. Street taxis have no meter: the price is agreed through the window before you get in, and the standard advice, Limeños included, is to use an app. On foot, two things work well: the Miraflores–Barranco axis, with about 4 km of continuous malecón, and the historic center by day. There are bike lanes on Av. Arequipa and the malecón, with bike-share in Miraflores and San Isidro.

The real risk in Lima is to your belongings, not violence against visitors: what gets lost here is phones and backpacks, on crowded transit, at the Mercado Central, on Jirón de la Unión and outside bars, plus theft by pairs on motorbikes at traffic lights when the car window is open. Miraflores, San Isidro, Barranco and the historic center by day can be walked with the normal caution of any big city. I'd avoid walking at night in the center after the shops close, in the streets of Rímac, in La Victoria outside the Gamarra shopping strip and around the stadiums on derby days, and I wouldn't use a street ATM after dark. Since 2024 extortion of transport workers and small businesses has been the country's security issue, with states of emergency declared in Lima and Callao in 2025 and 2026; for visitors passing through, that means seeing more police and soldiers at checkpoints, and little else. Watch for three common scams: change handed back with a fake note, the driver who says he has no change, and street money changing outside the accredited changers. On S/100 and S/200 notes, check the watermark before putting them away. Note two numbers: 105 for the police and 116 for the fire department; the Tourist Police have a post in Miraflores.

The greeting kiss

A kiss on the right cheek between women and between men and women, even in work introductions; between men, a handshake. Refusing and offering a hand instead reads as distant, even if no one says anything.

Ceviche only until the afternoon

Ceviche is a lunch dish; the Limeño rule is to never order it after 4pm.

Pisco is Peruvian

The dispute with Chile over pisco's origin is a serious matter and even has a spot on the official calendar. Calling pisco sour a Chilean drink ends the conversation; the same goes for crediting the potato or quinoa to another country.

Lunch: the day's main meal, between 1pm and 3:30pm

Eaten between 1pm and 3:30pm, it's the big meal of the day, and the three-course menú is the norm on weekdays. Dinner before 8:30pm is early, and a restaurant full at 10pm is normal.

Social invitations run 20 to 40 minutes late

A social invite with a set time usually starts 20 to 40 minutes after the agreed hour; a work meeting, not so. Texting on WhatsApp that you're on your way is part of the protocol.

Asking for the check

The waiter won't bring the check before you ask, because that would seem like rushing the customer out. Say “la cuenta, por favor” and wait; sitting for an hour after coffee is fine.

Downtown and Miraflores need two days

Treating Lima as a one-night stopover on the way to Cusco. Land at night and fly to Cusco the next morning, and you see only the airport and the hotel, while the historic center, the malecón from Miraflores to Barranco and a neighborhood cevichería need two full days.

Twelve kilometers that turn into an hour

Underestimating traffic. A 12 km trip takes 25 minutes at 7am on Sunday and more than an hour and a half at 6:30pm on Friday. Budget double the time your maps app suggests, and don't book two reservations less than three hours apart.

Hailing a taxi without agreeing on a price

Hailing a taxi on the street and getting in without agreeing on a price. There's no meter in the city: either you use an app, or you negotiate the fare through the window before opening the door. Getting in first and asking after is the wrong order.

Winter garúa: a jacket, not an umbrella

Expecting sun between June and September and packing only summer clothes. The garúa doesn't wet enough to justify an umbrella, but it soaks a jacket in an hour's walk on the malecón, and no mid-range hotel has heating.

Tap water and street ice

Drinking tap water or accepting ice at a street stall. In Lima the household habit is to boil water or buy it bottled, so stick to sealed bottles and order juices at busy places.

¿Cuánto está?

How much is it? Used more at markets and on the street than “¿cuánto cuesta?”

La cuenta, por favor

The check, please: you have to ask, nobody brings it unprompted

Al toque

Right away, on the spot: “te lo traigo al toque”

¡Qué bacán!

How cool: common Limeño slang; “chévere” also works

¿Me da la yapa?

Can you give me a little extra? The courtesy bonus a vendor tucks into the bag

¡Qué palta!

How embarrassing: literally “what an avocado”

The gravel, the rivers and the garúa

Lima occupies a fan of alluvial gravel between the Pacific and the first slopes of the Andes, from 0 to about 500 m of altitude, with arid hills appearing inside the urban grid. Three rivers with a torrential regime come down from the mountain range and cut through the city (Rímac, Chillón, and Lurín), and it's the Rímac that supplies almost all the drinking water, which turns any highland drought into an urban problem. It rains less than 10 mm a year because the cold Humboldt Current and the South Pacific anticyclone create a thermal inversion that traps humidity in a low layer: instead of rain, the city gets garúa, a mist that soaks without falling, and a ceiling of gray cloud from May to October. Between the city and the sea there is a wall of bluffs 60 to 80 meters high, and at its foot runs the Costa Verde, a seaside avenue opened in the 1960s over pebble beaches.

Three layers of street grid: from the colonial damero to the conos

The layout has three overlapping layers: the Spanish grid of 1535, with 117 original blocks around the Plaza Mayor; the southern seaside resorts, stitched to downtown by radial avenues like Arequipa in the 1920s; and the “conos” (Lima Norte, Este and Sur) neighborhoods born of land settlements from the 1950s onward that today hold most of the population, with San Juan de Lurigancho alone topping 1.2 million residents.

The subduction zone and the 1746 earthquake

All of Lima sits on an active subduction zone: the 1746 earthquake destroyed almost the entire city, and an event of magnitude close to 8 is treated by the state as a statistical certainty, not a hypothesis.

The European waltz became criolla

Lima turned the 19th-century European ballroom waltz into the valse criollo, played on guitar, cajón and voice; Chabuca Granda fixed the repertoire with “La flor de la canela”, from 1950, and October 31 became the Día de la Canción Criolla, contested each year against imported Halloween. The central coast is also the birthplace of the cajón, a wooden box that enslaved Afro-Peruvians turned into a drum and that today is a standard instrument of Spanish flamenco; the group Perú Negro, founded in 1969, and singers like Susana Baca and Eva Ayllón carried the festejo and the landó abroad. In the southern and eastern districts, Peruvian cumbia and chicha (Andean huayno with electric guitar, born of the 1960s migration) fill halls with thousands of people on weekends.

Peruvian literature: Ricardo Palma, Vargas Llosa, and Ribeyro

A good part of Peruvian literature is literature of Lima. Ricardo Palma invented the colonial city in the Tradiciones peruanas, published between 1872 and 1910; Julio Ramón Ribeyro wrote, in plain prose, the stories of office, boarding house and resentment that define it; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel laureate who died in April 2025, used the Leoncio Prado school and the downtown bars as his map. Sebastián Salazar Bondy answered all that nostalgia with the essay Lima la horrible, from 1964. In film, Francisco Lombardi and Claudia Llosa filmed the city of migration and internal conflict, and the Lima Film Festival, run by the PUCP since 1997, fills theaters in Miraflores and San Isidro in August.

Soccer splits the city

The derby between Alianza Lima and Universitario splits the city: Alianza plays its home games at Matute, in La Victoria, and Universitario at the Estadio Monumental. On derby day, traffic around the stadium is rerouted and the surrounding streets fill with fans and police, so it's best to arrive early or watch the game in a bar.

Conversation in the Cathedral, by Mario Vargas Llosa (1969)

The novel that opens by asking at what point Peru went wrong, and dissects Odría's Lima, bar by bar, newsroom by newsroom.

Lima la horrible, by Sebastián Salazar Bondy (1964)

A short essay that dismantles the nostalgia for a “colonial Arcadia” and explains why the capital was ashamed of the country that sustained it.

The Milk of Sorrow, by Claudia Llosa (2009)

A Golden Bear winner in Berlin, filmed on the sandy slopes of Manchay: the Lima built by those who fled the violence of the 1980s, on the other side of the malecón.