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Peru The Coastal Region
Peru's coast is a bleak, often rocky, and mountainous
desert
that runs from Chile to Ecuador, punctuated by fifty-two
small
rivers that descend through steep, arid mountains and
empty into
the Pacific. The Costa is a strange land of great dunes
and
rolling expanses of barren sand, at once a desert but with
periods of humidity as high as 90 percent in the winter
from June
to September, when temperatures in Lima average about 16
degrees
Celsius. Temperatures along the coast rise near the
equator in
the north, where the summer can be blazingly hot, and fall
to
cooler levels in the south. If climatic conditions are
right,
there can be a sudden burst of delicate plant life at
certain
places on the lunar-like landscape, made possible by the
heavy
mist. Normally, however, the mist is only sufficient to
dampen
the air, and the sand remains bleakly sterile. These
conditions
greatly favor the preservation of delicate archaeological
remains. The environment also facilitates human habitation
and
housing because the climate is benign and the lack of rain
eases
the need for water-tight roofing.
Humans have lived for over 10,000 years in the larger
coastal
valleys, fishing, hunting, and gathering along the rich
shoreline, as well as domesticating crops and inventing
irrigation systems. The largest of these littoral oases
became
the sites of towns, cities, religious centers, and the
seats of
ancient nations. Although migration from the highlands and
other
provincial regions has long occurred, the movement of
people to
the Costa was greatly stimulated by the growth of the
fishing
industry, which transformed villages and towns into
frontier-like
cities, such as Chimbote. In the early 1990s, over 53
percent of
the nation's people lived in these sharply delimited
coastal
valleys (see
table 4, Appendix). As the population becomes
ever
more concentrated in the coastal urban centers, people
increasingly overrun the rich and ancient irrigated
agricultural
lands, such as those in the Rímac Valley where greater
Lima is
situated, and the Chicama Valley at the site of the city
of
Trujillo. Although the region contains 160,500 square
kilometers
of land area, only 4 percent, or 6,900 square kilometers
of it,
is arable. By 1990 population growth had increased the
density of
habitation to 1,715 persons for each square kilometer of
arable
land (see
table 5, Appendix). Throughout all the coastal
valleys,
human settlements remain totally dependent on the waters
that
flow from the Andes along canals and aqueducts first
designed and
built 3,000 years ago. Here, uncontrolled and unplanned
urban
growth competes directly with scarce and vitally needed
agricultural land, steadily removing it from productive
use.
Data as of September 1992
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