One hundred years after the Peruvian Landscapes: The contemporary importance of the cultural landscape

Abstract

The geographical landscape has always been attractive to everyone because there you can express the human curiosity to know the surrounding world. The ways to present or to describe these landscapes fill the literature books and, in the Peruvian case, there are the works of all writers to a major or minor degree. Thus, at the beginning of the 20th century it is notable the figure of the historian José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma, himself an aristocrat from Lima who made an heroic travel from Cusco to Ocopa, Huancayo, at a time when there were not roads, making the trip on mule back. Here we present a brief description of an experience made in October, 2012, where we look to capture some of Riva-Agüero’s impressions that could have marked his vision about the life conditions of the high mountain people of the Andes, which may have changed his political view of them.