Larco Museum

The Larco holds around forty-five thousand catalogued pieces assembled by Rafael Larco Hoyle from the 1920s, housed in an eighteenth-century mansion built over a pre-Columbian pyramid in Pueblo Libre. Its distinctive feature is the visible storage: rather than keeping the bulk of the collection hidden, the museum opens rooms of shelving with thousands of ceramics ranked behind glass, which gives a sense of quantity that curated galleries never do. The gold and silver hall holds Chimú and Moche ornaments including the Nazca and Lambayeque work, and there is a well-known separate gallery of Moche erotic ceramics - a body of material that was long censored and which the museum presents with context about fertility and ritual. Larco's own contribution was scholarly as well: he proposed the chronology of Peruvian cultures that is still broadly used. The gardens and the restaurant are part of the visit.

History

In 1925 Rafael Larco Herrera bought about 600 ceramic pieces from his brother-in-law Alfredo Hoyle, and his son Rafael Larco Hoyle took charge of the collection, adding 8,000 pieces from Roa and 6,000 from Carranza. The museum opened on 28 July 1926, Independence Day, in a small house on the Chiclín estate (Wikipedia, Larco Museum).

What's there

• The open storerooms - thousands of ceramics on visible shelving.
• The gold hall - Chimú, Moche and Lambayeque ornaments and headdresses.
• The erotic ceramics - the Moche collection displayed with ritual context.
• The mansion - an eighteenth-century house built over an earlier pyramid.

When to go

Year-round. Two to three hours. Open late most days, and evenings are quieter than mid-afternoon. Book online in high season.

What to expect

One of the more expensive museums in Peru. Busy with tour groups in the middle of the day. Pueblo Libre is a taxi ride from the tourist districts. The erotic gallery is separate and clearly signed for those who prefer to skip it.

Nearby

The National Museum of Archaeology is also in Pueblo Libre; central Lima is east.

Key facts