Peru

The seat of Spanish power in South America, built on the empire it destroyed and on a mountain of silver. Pizarro captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 with fewer than two hundred men, arriving into an Inca civil war and a smallpox epidemic that had preceded him. The Viceroyalty of Peru then governed most of Spanish South America from Lima, and Potosi's silver - in what is now Bolivia but was then Peru - financed the Habsburgs and reached China through Manila, worked under the mita labour draft that killed vast numbers. Tupac Amaru II's rising in 1780 was the largest indigenous rebellion of the colonial period and was suppressed with deliberate brutality. Independence came late and largely from outside, declared by San Martin in 1821 and completed by Bolivar's generals at Ayacucho in 1824, because the creole elite had more to lose than to gain. Guano and then fishmeal, copper and gold followed. The Shining Path insurgency from 1980 and the state's response killed around seventy thousand people, most of them Quechua-speaking peasants. Machu Picchu was brought to world attention in 1911. Quechua and Aymara are official alongside Spanish. Lima is the capital. The country has about thirty-four million people. It holds thirteen World Heritage sites, among the most in the Americas. The Nazca lines were scraped into the desert around two thousand years ago. Peru is one of the world's centres of crop domestication, with thousands of potato varieties. The cold Humboldt current makes its fishery among the largest anywhere.

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