JAN 19, 2016 – I had booked a hostel in Miraflores, which is where most hostels (and tourists) are. It’s a good thing taxis are not too expensive in Peru, because Lima’s airport completely lacks any public transportation. There are van lines passing near it, but their use is apparently discouraged for safety reasons. Once arrived, I explored the city on foot, by bike, and by bus. Its structure is interesting: The historical center is a cheap area nowadays, and mostly locals live around it. The hillsides around the city, where one might expect penthouse districts, are poor neighborhoods. Most of the rich people live on the coast instead, in the Miraflores and Barranco districts. From the top of Cerro San Cristobal, where a van took me for less than two dollars, it became apparent just how small the “developed” part of the city is: Most of Lima consists of raw brick buildings, interspersed with simple huts. Apparently there is a tax incentive for never finishing to build your house, but I still think the city is poorer on average than any European capital, or than Mexico City for example. I wouldn’t make that statement for Peru as a whole, since countries like Bulgaria or Romania are much poorer in rural areas than in the big cities, which doesn’t seem to be the case in Peru. But that’s just my personal impression from the little I’ve seen of all these places.
The downtown area is full of colonial buildings, most of which were rebuilt several times due to earthquakes. In Miraflores, some ruins from the pre-incan Lima culture have only recently been found and excavated under a former landfill. The impressive pyramid, called Huaca Pucllana, is built entirely of adobe bricks, which allowed it to survive all the earthquakes.