Private Full-Day Best of Lima Tour

Overview

Spend a full private day with your own guide and driver covering Lima's UNESCO-listed historic center, the Larco Museum's pre-Columbian collection, and the clifftop Miraflores neighborhood.

Lima is one of South America's largest cities, and this full-day private tour is built to cover real ground efficiently with your own driver and guide, rather than leaving you to plan a route between scattered sights yourself. It moves from the colonial-era historic center to the Larco Museum's pre-Hispanic gold and textile collection, then out to the clifftop Miraflores district by the Pacific.

Highlights

• San Francisco Convent & Catacombs Tour the gorgeous colonial-era convent and descend into its underground catacombs.
• Plaza Mayor & Government Palace See the heart of colonial Lima, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Presidential Palace.
• Larco Museum Explore one of Latin America's premier pre-Columbian art collections, housed in an 18th-century mansion.
• Miraflores End the day in Lima's modern, clifftop seaside district overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

Spend a full private day with your own guide and driver covering Lima's UNESCO-listed historic center, the Larco Museum's pre-Columbian collection, and the clifftop Miraflores neighborhood. Lima is one of South America's largest cities, and this full-day private tour is built to cover real ground efficiently with your own driver and guide, rather than leaving you to plan a route between scattered sights yourself. It moves from the colonial-era historic center to the Larco Museum's pre-Hispanic gold and textile collection, then out to the clifftop Miraflores district by the Pacific.

The day's first stop, Lima's Plaza Mayor (also known as Plaza de Armas), marks the exact spot where Francisco Pizarro founded the city on January 18, 1535, naming it the 'City of Kings.' The square and the surrounding colonial-era buildings — the Cathedral, the Government Palace, the Archbishop's Palace, and the Municipal Palace — were collectively inscribed as part of the Historic Centre of Lima on UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1991, recognizing one of the best-preserved examples of Spanish colonial urban planning in the Americas.

From there, the tour continues to the Basilica and Convent of San Francisco, whose construction began in the mid-16th century and which still holds one of the most extensive colonial-era libraries in South America. Beneath the convent lie Lima's catacombs, used as a burial site until around 1810 and rediscovered only in 1943 after being forgotten for over a century; estimates of how many people are interred there vary widely depending on the source, from roughly 25,000 up into the tens of thousands, with the bones arranged in deep wells, some laid out in deliberate geometric and mandala-like patterns.

The Larco Museum, the afternoon stop, was founded in 1926 by Rafael Larco Hoyle, who built on a roughly 600-piece ceramic collection his father had acquired the year before. It's grown into one of the largest pre-Columbian collections anywhere, with around 45,000 objects spanning nearly 5,000 years of Peruvian history, and it was among the first museums in the world to open its storage galleries to public viewing rather than keeping most of a collection out of sight. The museum occupies an 18th-century viceroyalty-era mansion that, by the museum's own account, was built atop the remains of a pre-Columbian pyramid dating back roughly 1,300 years.

The day ends in Miraflores, Lima's modern clifftop district along the Pacific — a deliberate contrast to the morning's 16th-century streets and the afternoon's millennia-old artifacts, and a good reminder of how compressed Lima's layers of history really are within a single, walkable day.