Peru Dispatch: Lima the surreal.

La ciudad y los perros: A mutt snoozes in front of an assault tank guarding the Presidential palace in downtown. (Photos by C-M.)

For most of my life, I’ve been making regular sojourns to Lima to visit my father’s family, a collection of hyper-nostalgic oddballs and eccentrics that have always led me to believe that Gabriel García Márquez doesn’t write fiction. But on this occasion, on assignment for a travel guide, I really had an opportunity to explore the city. And explore it, I did — from ceviche dives in La Victoria to the skulls of saints at the Santo Domingo Church in downtown to the high-end lounges of Barranco, where Lima’s beautiful people arrive to sip coca leaf sours and show off their money. 

Lima is no thing of beauty. It clings precariously to a set of dusty, desert cliffs and is bathed in a perpetual fog six months out of the year. Much of its architecture is unremarkable, an assortment of concrete bunkers that appear to have been imported from 1960s East Germany. It is grimy. It is noisy. It is relentless in its sensory stimulation — from the food, which comes in a rainbow palette of nuclear colors, to the infinite supply of smog-belching buses, each of which is armed with a guy that hangs out the window and hollers the route: Arequipa, República, Abancaaaayyy. 

But peel away the top layers and underneath you will find a city that is a novel waiting to be written. (And it has, by everyone from Sebastián Salazar Bondy to Mario Vargas Llosa to Daniel Alarcón.) It is in Lima that 2,000 year-old adobe pyramids sit silently in residential neighborhoods. It is in Lima that Andean cuy is doused in soy sauce and served Peking-style. And it is in Lima that well-to-do tennis moms and Ayacucho grandmothers in big skirts and braids all come together. It is a city imbued with a legacy of plunder and violence, but which has inherited all the pomp of a former viceregal capital. It is both ridiculous and sublime; one of the most preposterous settlements on earth. So, in homage to Salazar Bondy, C-Mon presents: Lima, the Surreal.

Click on images to supersize. 

Surrealist Element #1: The fog, otherwise known as garúa, which blankets the city roughly six months out of the year. Limeños often joke about not knowing what the sky looks like. At night, it can get so thick, that walking down the street can seem as if you’re sharing the sidewalk with a bunch of shadows.

Surrealist Element #2, Version A: That big brown mound? Huaca Pucllana: An adobe pyramid, built by the Lima culture, a couple of centuries after the birth of Christ. It is now surrounded by middle class homes in the neighborhood of Miraflores.

New and old, Version B: Huaca Huallamarca: Another pre-Inca structure. This one, in the tony neighborhood of San Isidro, just blocks away from the Lima Golf and the super-deluxe Country Club Lima Hotel. 

Version C: The ruins of Pachacamac in the front, which dates back to 200 A.D.; the storied former shanty town of Villa El Salvador, which dates to 1970, to the back.

Surrealist Element #3: Peruvian hairless dogs. Wearing sweaters. Hilarious.

Surrealist Element #4: Displays such as this — a park installation devoted to the Peruvian National Police.

Disturbingly Surrealist Element #5: The vast gulf between rich and poor. Looking like the U.S./Mexico border “fence,” the floodlit wall, above, protects the residents of the wealthy neighborhood of Las Cuantarias Casuarinas from the impoverished area of Pamplona Alta, which resides just to other side of this hill. The wall is best appreciated in the evenings, when it is lit and highly visible from the Museo Oro del Peru, in neighboring Monterrico.

#6: Cuzco School art. In the 17th and 18th century, the Spanish in Peru taught legions of Andean natives to paint religious canvases in a Western style. Rarely are any of the individual painters ever credited by name.

#7: Virgins that cry.

#8: Saint skulls decked out in headdresses made of roses.

#9: A chain supermarket that incorporates the interior patio of what was once a private, neo-colonial mansion. 

#10: Sandwiches that appear to have been crafted by Ellsworth Kelly.

#11: Supermarket seafood displays inspired by Jules Verne.

#12: A decadent light and water show, set to, among other things, traditional Peruvian waltzes.

#13: Watching the sun and the fog duke it out over San Lorenzo Island, where my grandfather was once held as a political prisoner under some forgotten dictatorship at some point in the first half of the 20th century.

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Need more? Pick up Mario Testino’s Lima, Peru. No book of photography better captures the city’s whacked-out energy.