GO PERU: Manchán Maganslept rough on the beach on his last trip to the Peruvian capital. This time he got to see another side of the city, including a private collection of five-star art
FROM THE MOMENT I woke up in the five-star Miraflores Park Hotel in Lima, the Peruvian capital, I felt a sense of disorientation. The hotel was right over the strand where on my last visit I had slept rough, having run out of funds at the end of my holiday. Everything had changed so much. Coca-leaf sweets were on sale in the newsagent, as was coca tea at the airport – unimaginable on my previous visit, when Peru was still currying favour with the US and distancing itself from its most sacred and potent medicinal plant, which the west stupidly makes into cocaine. It was clear there was a new optimism, a new sense of pride among the people about their past, their illustrious Inca lineage.
Lima is now a gregarious and increasingly affluent city, with newly painted buildings and just enough Latino chaos to make it invigorating without being scary. I looked in vain for the sense of gun-toting paranoia that I remembered. Even the notorious grey Lima skies seemed a fraction less leaden. The gaudy golden baubles of the colonial era are being gradually renovated, and the old churches and palaces are regaining their elegance. As the centre of conquistador expansion for centuries, the city is draped in a glorious excess of golden icons, embossed silver panels, elaborate carvings in dark Amazonian wood, rooms full of works from the Rubens school and priceless Moorish tiles given by Inca princesses. The grand plazas are surrounded by the white cliffs of elaborately decorated colonial edifices, like chess pieces in a showpiece alabaster set.
On my first morning I visited the catacombs of the San Francisco monastery, a network of narrow coved tunnels filled with skeletons piled five metres deep. I could actually taste on my tongue the residue of 500 years of European bodies. I could feel their colonial dust rattling through my lungs. It did nothing to ease my sense of disorientation.
Directly afterwards, I visited the house of an affluent Lima socialite and art collector. I arrived at his door with a film of human dust still on my fingers – it felt like the stuff vampires decompose into when staked.
My host, Señor Ciurlizza, with patrician good manners, waved aside my obvious shock at seeing in his home a collection of works by Rodin, Matisse, Míro and Picasso. I was wondering how they had ended up here – and how I had.
Peru in my memory was a place of terror in the grip of the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, whose members were still holding up buses when I was here last, robbing them and shooting anyone with a US passport. Now there is peace.
“To understand Lima you need to visit our homes,” Señor Ciurlizza was saying. “We have been through so much in recent years we tend to be private now. You need to let us know you’re coming, so we can welcome you properly.”
I had gained access to his home through the guide the tour company had provided me with, a well-connected member of the Benavides family, one of the great Latin American dynasties. It was like being shown around Dublin by a De Valera 30 years ago, or around Delhi by one of Nehru’s family.
I suddenly understood what elite travel was all about. It’s the equivalent of doing the grand tour in the 18th century with a letter of introduction from an aristocrat.
I found it hard to process it all. I knew Peru had always been fabulously wealthy; after the fortunes made from gold and silver in the 16th and 17th centuries, yet another wave of wealth came in the 19th century from guano – thick deposits of bird excrement off the coast, sold as fertiliser, at enormous profit, to Europe. But all this splendour was so at odds with the Lima I had known in the past, the poverty I had seen and the terror I felt when a soldier whipped his sub-machine gun at me.
“That’s all over now,” Señor Ciurlizza assured me while his gloved butler served me an iced pisco sour and a selection of his personally designed canapes – ostentatious concoctions of the type presumed extinct since the 1970s. “Now we are hopeful.”
On my way to his house I had seen oleaginous-haired youngsters with the features of Amazon Indians selling Inca Kola and 7Up, and women with baseball hats sweeping the dusty pavement.
We had passed through low-slung Taco Bell architecture that looked like any blue-collar district in Los Angeles. At one point the iron-grilled bungalows had suddenly given way to something entirely different, something extraordinary. The suburbs were pierced by an alien object. An enormous mud-brick pyramid that soared into the sky. It was called Huaca Pucllana and was the centre of the community of squash and coca-leaf farmers who lived here 1,000 years before the Incas.
My guide told me it was a place for sacrificial offerings to the deities of the underworld – offerings of women and children were made here. I asked him to stop the car so I could get a proper look. An image I had seen of Mayan sacrifice in which women’s heads were chopped off and allowed to roll down a pyramid came to mind.
As I brought my fingers to the ground I remembered how in the desert everything eventually turns to dust, and I realised that I was probably in contact with yet more human remains.
This image was still haunting me when, an hour later, Señor Ciurlizza reached out to gently offer me one of his rare lime bonbons. All I could do was stare blankly at him.
“The recipe is 400 years old,” he said pleadingly, “from the oldest convent in Lima. It takes me four days to make them. I am the last person alive who knows how.”
Four hundred years. The same age as the bodies in the catacombs. A quarter of the age of the sacrificed women and children. I found it hard to know what to say, to process this information. Before I could think, a butler was gliding across the room with a silver platter of the bonbons – candied limes filled with a thick creme. Instinctively, I brought one to my lips. It tasted like . . . like nothing I had ever tasted. There is no comparison. The 400 years since it was created have separated it from anything similar. It is a taste that those bodies I had walked on earlier would have known, a taste that those poor women and children thrown from the pyramid would not have known. The taste of 16th-century convent-created delicacies.
If you happen to visit Lima and gain access to Señor Ciurlizza’s private collection, make sure to ask him for one.
That is all I can say. I was in no fit state to come to a more conclusive opinion of Lima. The incongruity of sleeping in a room with a pillow menu directly above where I slept rough, and the pervasive feel of human dust in my lungs, had me too bewildered to know any more. But I sensed that the city had more to offer than I had previously given it credit for, and I regretted the times I advised people to pass through as quickly as possible.
* Manchán Magan was a guest of Cazenove+Loyd (00-44-20- 73842332, www.cazloyd.com). A week’s holiday costs from £2,200pp (€2,550pp), based on two sharing, including flights, two nights’ BB at Miraflores Park in Lima and four nights’ full-board at Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge
Where to stay, where to eat and where to go
Where to stay
Miraflores Park Hotel. Avenida Malecón de la Reserva 1035, Lima, 00-51-1-6104000, miraflorespark.com. Luxury hotel right on the coast.
Where to eat
Astrid Gastón. Calle Cantuarias 175, Miraflores, Lima, 00-51-1-2425387, astridygaston.com. Outstanding new Peruvian cookery. Expensive but worth it.
Bar Cordano. Ancash 202, Barrio Chino, 00-51-1-4270181. Century-old bar famous for buti fara y pan francés (baked ham on French bread). Served with chicha morada, or purple corn boiled with fruit. Its causa rellena – spicy mashed potato filled with vegetables or chicken – is also legendary.
A visit to a cevicheria for Peru’s national dish of ceviche, or marinated fish, is obligatory. Try Pescados Capitales (La Mar 1337, Miraflores, 00-51-1- 4218808) or La Mar (Avenida La Mar 770, Miraflores, 00-51-1-4213365).
Where to go
San Francisco catacombs. Plaza San Francisco, Jirón Ancash and Lampa, Central Lima, 00-51-1-4267377 www.museocatacumbas.com. Home to the bones of 10,000 people.
Soaking up life on Plaza de Armas, surrounded by the Palacio Arzobispal, Palacio de Gobierno and cathedral, is how everyone spends their time.
For a break from the chaos head to Barranco, a tranquil arts-and-crafts suburb next to Miraflores. Adorable cafes and craft stalls in crumbling colonial houses. Great sea views.