How Many Days in Lima? — Trip Planner

What first-timers get wrong in Lima

Do not flag a street taxi; use Uber, Cabify or inDrive, where the price is fixed before you get in. The Metropolitano busway crosses the city faster than any car during rush hour. Traffic between Miraflores and the centre can take an hour at the wrong moment. Drink bottled water. And note that Lima sits at sea level, so the altitude advice you were given belongs to Cusco.

What's actually worth your time in Lima

The Malecon runs six kilometres of clifftop park above the Pacific in Miraflores, entirely free, with paragliders launching off the edge beside Parque Raimondi. Huaca Pucllana is an adobe pyramid stranded among apartment blocks and floodlit after dark. Barranco's Puente de los Suspiros and its surrounding bars make the evening walk. Larcomar, carved into the cliff face, is a shopping mall with a view and nothing more.

Lima's museums, and which one to pick

Museo Larco in Pueblo Libre opens daily from nine to seven, holidays included, and charges S/50 for Moche portrait vessels, a walk-through storage room holding thousands of pots on open shelves, and a separate erotic ceramics gallery. MALI occupies a Beaux-Arts exhibition palace in the centre. Museo Amano in Miraflores concentrates on pre-Columbian textiles and admits small groups by timed entry.

Lima with kids, realistically

The Circuito Magico del Agua in Parque de la Reserva lets children run through thirteen fountains and stages a projected light show after dark, and it is the cheapest reliable win in the city. Parque Kennedy in Miraflores is full of resident cats. Skip city buses entirely with children and use Uber or Cabify. Miraflores and Barranco have proper pavements; the historic centre does not.

When the weather turns in Lima

Lima almost never rains. It sits instead under garua, a grey coastal fog, from roughly May to November, and the sun simply does not appear for weeks. The bad-weather plan is therefore the winter plan: Museo Larco, MALI, the bone-stacked catacombs beneath San Francisco, a slow lunch inside the Surquillo market, and accepting that the light will stay flat all day.

When to go to Lima

The month to avoid is March — around 25°C (77°F) with roughly 4 rain days. Prices and crowds track the weather here: April is the sweet spot, March the month most people skip.

Pack for peak season: Summer clothes, plus one light layer for air-con and evenings, Comfortable walking shoes — every guide on this site assumes you'll use them.