Start from 61 curated places around Lima, PE, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Maido
The Miraflores restaurant that earned the number-one spot on the World's 50 Best list in 2025, serving Nikkei cuisine — the century-old Lima fusion of Japanese technique and Peruvian coastal ingredients. The tasting menu moves through ceviches, tiraditos, sea snail in soy foam, and a squid ramen that has no real peer in the city.
Central
Virgilio Martinez's Barranco restaurant structures its tasting menu around altitude — each course represents a distinct Peruvian ecosystem, from the coast at zero meters to the high Andes above 4,000 meters. It has held a World's 50 Best top-ten slot for several years and still manages to feel less formal than the rankings suggest.
Trails & outdoors
Malecon Clifftop Walk (Miraflores to Barranco)
The 3.5-kilometer clifftop path connecting Miraflores's Kennedy Park to Barranco's Bridge of Sighs — a flat, paved walk above the Pacific that passes Parque del Amor, the Miraflores lighthouse, and the paragliding launch point. Easy difficulty, entirely paved, accessible to all fitness levels, with the ocean dropping away below the cliff face the whole route.
Ciclovía Costa Verde (Beach-Level Circuit)
The 6-kilometer bike and pedestrian path at the base of the Costa Verde cliffs, below Miraflores and Barranco — a flat seaside route tracing the beach circuit from Chorrillos to Chucuito at ocean level. The path passes multiple surf beaches, restaurants perched on the cliff, and the Waikiki and Makaha surf breaks. Rentable bikes are available at several points along the circuit.
Things to do
La Candelaria Pena Criolla
The Barranco peña that has preserved Peruvian creole music and Afro-Peruvian dance in a proper theatrical setting since it began — shows combine música criolla, landó, festejo, and Andean folkloric dance performed by a resident company. It runs Thursday through Sunday with a cover charge and a food menu, and draws the mix of Lima families and curious visitors that defines a healthy cultural venue.
Gran Teatro Nacional
Peru's largest performing arts venue, opened in 2012 in San Borja with a 1,500-seat auditorium that books opera, ballet, orchestral concerts, theater, and international circus companies year-round. The exterior LED facade is the most architecturally striking night building in Lima, and ticket prices for national company performances are low enough that residents book casually.
Landmarks & sights
Huaca Pucllana
A mud-brick ceremonial pyramid rising six stories out of the Miraflores residential grid, built by the Lima culture around 400 CE. English-speaking guides lead you up the ramps to the illuminated top platform, and the site is genuinely eerie after dark when the layers of handmade bricks glow amber.
Museo Larco
The world's largest private collection of pre-Columbian Peruvian art, housed in an 18th-century viceregal mansion built over a seventh-century pyramid in Pueblo Libre. The real draw is the storeroom — open to visitors — where thousands of ceramics are shelved floor-to-ceiling without glass cases, giving you the rare sense of actually handling history.