Museo Larco Lima PERU TOUR Review – Pre-Columbian Treasures

Ascending the flower-lined gentle slope path to the museum’s front doors, you are readied for what is to follow. The taxi you took through typical urban hubbub to get there is quickly erased.

Quickly Awestruck

From the other three sides of an inside patio with benches, the museums treasures are attractively displayed in dim light. You are quickly awestruck by the high quality of each piece. They seem almost too good to be true. Textiles from Inca times are brightly colored. The paint on bright Nazca pottery seems recently applied and like it might still be wet. They are ancient, Pre-Columbian and without sign of dust or crack. Beyond the collections on view, there are tourable storehouses of perhaps orders of magnitude more pieces in this same pristine condition.

Have no worries. These are real and, without hyperbole, truly treasures of world heritage.

Visit Museo Larco Twice

For the first-time Peru visitor the only question might be on whether it is better to visit Museo Larco before or after your tour of the country.

Perhaps the best recommendation would be to bookend any tour of a month or longer with a visit to Museo Larco – a sort of visual cliff notes on Peru’s amazing pre-Columbian cultures.

How interesting that the exquisite turquoise figurines you see are from the “city of fleas”, Piqillakta, where today’s tour through the ruins mainly gives you a glimpse to the massive walls and population it housed, and not to its artifacts.

While you still may be puzzling over the source and meaning of the Nazca lines, here you see so many pieces of pottery with their distinctive bright colors and black lined geometric patterns, somehow with affect so reminiscent of the doodles below that you see on a Nazca plane tour.

You may have been impressed by the ancient fragments of clothing preserved with the Juanita de Arequipa mummy. These Inca textiles however look like they just came out of the dry cleaners!

When you see the many pottery designs emphasizing Yin Yang type duality, you may also be reminded of Pukara tour guides recounting the migrations from Asia that came to Peru.

When:

Daily 9 – 10 PM (Check website for earlier closing time on holidays)

Where:

Avenida Bolívar 1515, Pueblo Libre 
Lima 21 - Peru 

Tickets:

S/ 30 (discounts for seniors, students, children)

For more information visit the Museo Larco website.

Click here for more Low Season Travel:  Peru Tour stories

Click here to read more Picture this Post travel stories by Amy Munice with photography by Peter Kachergis.