Why it looks like this

Francisco Pizarro staked out the 'City of Kings' in 1535 on the Rímac River, with the standard Spanish grid: square blocks around the Plaza Mayor, a pattern still intact at the centre and UNESCO-listed. Colonial Lima was the capital of Spanish South America for centuries.

The strange part is the climate: Lima is one of the driest big cities on Earth — a few millimetres of drizzle a year — alive only because three rivers descend from the Andes through it. The modern metropolis of ten million spreads across the desert plain and up dusty hillsides, its edges defined by irrigation, not rain.