Huaca Pucllana

Right in residential Miraflores, a great adobe pyramid of seven stepped platforms rises 22 metres over a compound more than 500 metres long. The Lima culture built it between about AD 200 and 700. A wall split it in two: one side held a plaza with benches and pits for offerings of fish and shellfish, the other an administrative area of small courtyards. Later the Wari buried their dead on top, and one tomb found intact held three adults, two of them masked, and a sacrificed child.

You see it with a guide on a set circuit: the site museum, the excavated platforms, a garden of native plants and animals, and a craft house. Music recorded on panpipes, bone flutes and rattles dug up here plays at five stops along the way. Closed Tuesdays. There are night visits Wednesday to Sunday, except the first Sunday of the month, when the pyramid is floodlit, and the restaurant on the grounds looks straight onto it.