Ciudad de los Reyes: How Lima Became the Capital of Spanish South America

On January 6, 1535, the feast of the Epiphany, Francisco Pizarro stood in a coastal valley ten kilometres from the Pacific and laid out a Spanish street grid in the dirt. He named the new city Ciudad de los Reyes, the City of Kings, after the three magi of the Christmas story. He placed the first stone of the cathedral. He gave himself the corner lot facing the main square. He had been governing the conquest from Cusco for fourteen months, and he had found Cusco unworkable. The altitude killed European mules. The distance from the port killed European logistics. The viceroyalty needed a capital the Pacific could feed. Lima was that capital, and the walking tour you are about to take traces the original eight blocks of it.

The name on paper was Ciudad de los Reyes. The name in practice was always Lima, after the river the indigenous Quechua called Rimac, the one who speaks. By the eighteenth century the official name had quietly surrendered to the older one. The conqueror's grand title for his colonial capital outlived him in documents and on royal seals; on the tongues of the people who actually lived there, it never really took.

What a viceregal capital actually did

For three hundred years, Lima was not just a city. It was the administrative head of the Viceroyalty of Peru, an empire-within-an-empire that at its height ran from Panama to Tierra del Fuego. Every Spanish appointment for South America passed through Lima. Every royal decree. Every Inquisition trial. Every shipment of silver from the great mine at Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, was hauled overland to Lima, loaded at the port of Callao, and shipped north along the coast to Panama City. There the silver was carried by mule train across the isthmus and put back on Atlantic ships for Seville. Lima was the choke point on the largest extractive trade flow of the early modern world.

The buildings the viceroyalty raised on the Plaza Mayor were a physical hierarchy. The Cathedral, largest. The Government Palace, second. The Archbishop's Palace, third. Everything else, smaller. The hierarchy reads in the rooflines if you stand in the centre of the plaza and turn slowly. That arrangement was not aesthetic. It was law. The Laws of the Indies, the body of Spanish royal decrees that governed how colonial cities were built, prescribed the grid, the central square, and the placement of the cathedral, the government house, and the church of the principal religious order. Every Spanish colonial capital in the Americas was built from the same template. Lima is one of the most legible examples because so much of the original grid survived the earthquakes.

Two earthquakes did most of the damage. In 1687, a major tremor cracked the cathedral and brought down sections of the Baroque churches. In 1746, a more devastating quake destroyed roughly three quarters of the city and generated a tsunami that erased the port of Callao. Five thousand people died. The Lima that the City of Kings tour walks today is largely the eighteenth-century rebuild, raised on top of seventeenth-century foundations, raised on top of Pizarro's grid. The Cathedral was finished and refinished and finished again across two and a half centuries. The granite façade of La Merced was completed in 1765, in the heavy Churrigueresque style, the most extreme ornament that the Spanish Baroque ever produced. Every layer of the historic centre is a layer of recovery.

The criollos and what they invented

The official story of viceregal Lima was Spanish. The actual social structure was more complicated. The colonial city was run by criollos, the American-born descendants of Spanish settlers, who held most of the wealth and an awkward share of the political power. Madrid did not fully trust them, and they did not fully trust Madrid. By the eighteenth century the criollos had developed a distinct identity. They thought of themselves as American without thinking of themselves as indigenous. They built mansions, served on cabildos, sponsored saint cults, and quietly stopped being entirely Spanish.

What the criollos invented, more than anything else, was a cuisine. Criollo cooking, the Lima coastal kitchen, is the product of three centuries of contact between Andean ingredients (potatoes, aji peppers, quinoa, cassava), Spanish ingredients (lime, citrus, wheat, garlic, onion, beef, lard), African ingredients and techniques (brought by enslaved labourers and adapted in domestic kitchens), and the cold, productive Humboldt Current that runs up the coast and supplies one of the densest fisheries in the world. Ceviche is the most famous result. The fish was always available. The lime was a Spanish import. The chili came down from the rainforest. The cilantro is Mediterranean. The dish is a hybrid, and the hybrid is the city.

In the nineteenth century the criollo kitchen absorbed two more arrivals: the Cantonese cooking of Chinese indentured labourers, which became the chifa tradition, and the Japanese cooking of late nineteenth-century immigrants, which became nikkei. By the twentieth century, Lima had a coastal cuisine that incorporated the four hemispheres without thinking it was unusual. That is criollo identity in a sentence. The world arrived, and Lima made a hybrid out of it, and then ate the hybrid for lunch.

The Church as the second government

The other great institution of viceregal Lima was the religious orders. The Dominicans, Franciscans, Mercedarians, Augustinians, and Jesuits each ran a convent in the colonial centre, and the convents were not small. They occupied whole blocks. They housed friars, novices, schools, hospitals, libraries, and the burial vaults that received colonial Lima's dead. The catacombs beneath the Convent of San Francisco, which the tour visits in capsule, held the bones of between twenty-five and seventy thousand people, accumulated across the three centuries when the convent was Lima's principal Catholic burial site.

The orders also ran the intellectual life of the city. The University of San Marcos, founded by royal decree in 1551, held its first classes in the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo. It is the oldest university in the Americas, eighty-five years older than Harvard. Before the university had its own building, the Dominicans gave it theirs. The first Latin Mass in Lima was celebrated in 1534, on the future site of La Merced, by Mercedarian friars who had arrived with Pizarro's expedition. The Mercedarians had a fourth vow, beyond poverty, chastity, and obedience: they were sworn to offer themselves as hostages to ransom Christian captives. That was the order's founding mission. In Lima it became, for the most part, a parish responsibility, but the willingness to march alongside soldiers had brought them to South America in the first place.

The same orders ran the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which operated in Lima from 1569 to 1820. Most of its trials were minor, involving bigamy, blasphemy, or unlicensed printing. Some were not. The autos-da-fe held in the Plaza Mayor were occasional public spectacles in which convicted heretics were paraded, sentenced, and in a few cases burned. The bronze fountain in the centre of the plaza was installed in 1651 and watched these proceedings without comment. It also watched the bullfights, the military parades, the proclamations of new viceroys, and on July 28, 1821, the proclamation of Peruvian independence by the Argentine general José de San Martín. The fountain is still there. It is the oldest surviving monument in Lima, and it has outlived every regime it ever observed.

The break and the long aftermath

San Martín's proclamation in 1821 ended the viceroyalty in name. It took three more years and the Battle of Ayacucho in December 1824 to end it in fact. The political weight shifted slowly. The Plaza Mayor became the Plaza de Armas. The Government Palace, on the site of Pizarro's original residence, kept its function: the President of Peru still works there, in a Neo-Baroque building completed in 1938 on the foundations of what is essentially the same address Pizarro picked in 1535.

Pizarro himself ended early. He was assassinated in that residence on June 26, 1541, by supporters of his former partner Diego de Almagro, in a dispute over the spoils of conquest. His remains had a complicated afterlife. For eighty-six years, from 1891 to 1977, the Cathedral displayed what it claimed was his mummified body. In 1977, workers repairing the crypt found a lead box behind a wall, inscribed with Pizarro's name and containing bones with sword wounds consistent with his known death. The mummy on display was someone else. Nobody knows who. The real bones were authenticated and placed in a side chapel, where they remain. The City of Kings still has its founder in residence, in a glass case, available for inspection.

That is the city the tour walks. Eight stops, two and a half kilometres, the original colonial grid still on the ground. A capital that ran a continent for three hundred years and then, when the empire collapsed, kept its grid and rebuilt around it. The criollo identity that emerged inside the viceroyalty became the cultural foundation of modern Peru. The Plaza Mayor, the Cathedral, the Government Palace, San Francisco and its catacombs, Santo Domingo and its university: these are not a museum. They are the working centre of a city of eleven million people, with the founder of the city quite literally on display at the centre of it all.