12.0598° S, 77.0374° W

LIMA

Most Famous People Born in Lima, Peru

Notable people

2,379

Peak decade

1980s

Median birth year

1958

Most distinctive

Presenter 5.3×

A colonial capital whose 20th-century bench reads almost like a screen test. Lima's distinctive professions are television presenters and models at the top — the legacy of a Peruvian beauty-pageant and broadcast tradition that has produced Mario Testino and a generation of newsreaders — alongside lawyers, diplomats, and economists from the city that has always run Peru. The 17th-century shelf is still unusually heavy, the era of Rose of Lima and the first canonised saints of the Americas, and the modern half runs through Ricardo Palma and Vargas Llosa.