Beaches in Peru

Twenty-four hundred kilometres of Pacific coast, and the Humboldt Current defines all of it — cold water, almost no rain, and among the most productive fisheries in the world. The result is a desert coastline where the sea is too cold to swim comfortably for most of the year and the wildlife is exceptional: sea lions, Humboldt penguins, and seabird colonies whose guano built a nineteenth-century export boom. The far north around Máncora is the exception, where warmer water arrives and Peru's beach tourism concentrates. Elsewhere the coast is visited for the archaeology and the birds rather than for bathing. Paracas, four hours south of Lima, holds the red-sand beaches and the guano islands that made the country briefly rich. Máncora in the far north has the country's warm water and its beach tourism, and the coastline between it and Lima is desert with almost nothing on it for a thousand kilometres.