Peru is a country on the west coast of South America. Ecuador sits to the north, Bolivia and Brazil to the east, Chile to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. A huge spine of Andes mountains runs through the country, so you get a dry coastal strip, high cold uplands, and rainforest on the far side of the mountains — three very different worlds inside one name. Lima, on the coast, is the capital. People outside Peru often think first of the Inca, the Native American people who ruled a great mountain empire before the Spanish arrived, and of Machu Picchu, the famous stone city high in the mountains. That picture is real, and it is also incomplete: Peru is a living country of tens of millions of people, where Spanish is the main public language and Quechua and other Indigenous languages are still spoken. The old empire is a deep part of how the country is imagined, though actually most Peruvians today are not “Inca” in the tourist-poster sense; they are citizens of a modern republic with cities, farms, mines, and the same mix of pride and ordinary life you would find anywhere.