Museo Larco

Museo Larco is Lima's most beautiful museum, a private collection of pre-Columbian art housed in a whitewashed 18th-century colonial mansion draped in bougainvillea, built over a pre-Columbian pyramid. Its galleries trace thousands of years of ancient Peruvian cultures through exquisite gold and silver work, ceramics, and textiles, displayed with unusual clarity. Uniquely, it lets you walk through its vast storage vaults, where tens of thousands of catalogued ceramic vessels line the shelves, a staggering sense of the civilisation's scale.

The museum is also famous (and frank) about its gallery of pre-Columbian erotic pottery. With lovely gardens and an acclaimed café-restaurant on a vine-covered terrace, it's as much a serene afternoon as a museum visit, one of the best ways to understand Peru before the Inca.

Niet missen

• Pre-Columbian gold and silver treasures
• The walk-through storage vaults of tens of thousands of ceramics
• The frank gallery of erotic pottery
• The bougainvillea-draped colonial mansion and gardens
• The acclaimed terrace café-restaurant

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Goed om te weten

• Don't skip the storage vaults, walking among the tens of thousands of catalogued pots is the unforgettable part.
• It's open late; an evening visit plus dinner on the terrace is a great combination.
• The erotic-pottery gallery is clearly signposted and easy to skip if visiting with children.
• It's in Pueblo Libre, away from Miraflores, factor in a taxi each way.

Een stukje geschiedenis

Founded in 1926 by collector Rafael Larco Hoyle, a pioneer of Peruvian archaeology, the museum is set in a viceroyalty-era mansion built atop a 7th-century pre-Columbian pyramid. Its collection spans some 5,000 years of pre-Columbian history, with particular depth in Moche culture.