Regions of Peru Regions of Peru The regions () of Peru are the first-level administrative subdivisions of Peru. Since its 1821 independence, Peru had been divided into departments () but faced the problem of an increasing centralization of political and economic power in its capital, Lima. After several unsuccessful decentralization attempts, the legal figure of "region" became official and regional governments were elected to manage the departments on November 20, 2002, until their planned fusion into real regions. Under the new arrangement, the former 24 departments plus the Callao Province have become regional circumscriptions. The province of Lima has been excluded from this
Peru as loose confederation of cities scattered along the coast of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, the Chimu flourished from about 1140 to 1450. Their capital was at Chan Chan outside of modern-day Trujillo. In the highlands, both the Tiahuanaco culture, near Lake Titicaca in both Peru and Bolivia, and the Wari culture, near the present-day city of Ayacucho, developed large urban settlements and wide-ranging state systems between 500 and 1000 AD. In the 15th century, the Incas emerged as a powerful state which, in the span of a century, formed the largest empire in pre-Columbian America with their capital in