Peru

Quick facts

How to spot Peru from satellite imagery

Peru covers 1.29 million square kilometres on the western coast of South America — the third-largest country on the continent after Brazil and Argentina. The country has one of the most extreme cross-sectional geographies on Earth: a narrow coastal desert strip in the west, the high Andes running down the centre, and the vast lowland Amazon in the east. Within a few hundred kilometres, you can travel from a coastline that hasn't seen significant rain in decades to glaciated peaks over 6,000 metres to dense tropical rainforest where annual rainfall exceeds 3,000 millimetres. Few countries on Earth pack so much landscape variety into a single national footprint.

For geography games, Peru is a high-value country to learn because each of the three major regions has a strongly distinctive aerial signature. This guide walks through the cues that lock Peru in fast and tell you which region you have landed in.