A New Museum of National Treasures for Peru

The new Museo de la Nacion here, which opens to the public on Thursday, is a work-in-progress, assembled with a shoestring budget in a hand-me-down building. But it aspires to be the largest and best museum in Latin America, a fitting home for one of the Western Hemisphere’s archeological treasure troves.

The Museum of the Nation, Peru’s first attempt to house examples of its array of cultural wealth in a single institution, was dedicated Feb. 19. President Alan Garcia, who leaves office July 28 after a tumultuous five-year term that saw inflation soar to 2,700% last year, presided at the opening ceremony for what may become one of his major legacies.

Garcia invited former President Fernando Belaunde, a longtime political rival, to join him on the podium to underscore the continuity that the museum hopes to represent.

With their lives now clouded by so many daunting crises, Peruvians are looking to the museum--and the nation’s rich past on display within--as a source of pride and unity as they grope toward a healthier future.

The museum building, nine stories in a concrete-and-glass tower, is an example of the trials that Peru has endured in recent years, and of the imagination the nation has had to use to make do.

Built as the Fisheries Ministry 15 years ago, it later served as the headquarters of the government bank. The building is in the San Borja neighborhood, one of the modern suburbs that have surged as colonial downtown Lima decays under the weight of hundreds of thousands of poor immigrants escaping guerrilla war and poverty in the Andes.

“It was the Fisheries Ministry until the fish left, and a bank until the money got scarce,” Museum Director Fernando Cabieses said with a smile at the opening festivities. “This building is not an island in the tempestuous economic climate of the country.”

Cabieses, a neurosurgeon and friend of Garcia’s without experience in museums or archeology, is credited with cobbling together the funds and displays in less than one year, after Garcia decided to turn the building into a museum.

“Here are our roots,” Cabieses said. “We need to feed the roots when the leaves and branches are angry.”

He completed this first phase for just $500,000, provided by the Peruvian government, although he said the second phase beginning now will require $15 million for additional displays, research facilities, air conditioning and four auditoriums. With the same energy and cajoling he applied within Peru for the first phase, he is taking aim at foreign governments and institutions to help with subsequent projects.

With more than 60,000 square meters of floor space, the museum has plenty of room to grow. The initial exhibits, dating from 2800 BC to the latecomer Inca Empire, cover less than one-tenth of that area. A vast atrium with a web of walkways connecting the galleries above make the building better for a museum than most office towers.

The new museum has received donations from private collections and from other Peruvian museums, including the older national Museum of Anthropology, which is resisting the government’s effort to merge the two institutions within the new Museum of the Nation. Some of the exhibits are copies of pieces still housed elsewhere, or held abroad thanks to the extensive market in pre-Columbian artifacts.

Peru has been a principal victim of this trade, which has encouraged the looting of thousands of archeological sites on the desert coast and in the Andean valleys. The U.S. government, at Peru’s request, is expected shortly to approve a regulation barring the importation of artifacts of the Moche culture, which flourished north of Lima from AD 100-700. That is viewed as an important step in protecting Peru’s “cultural patrimony.”

The items on display include a Moche drinking vessel, in the shape of a warrior with a slashed throat holding a knife in one hand and a drinking straw in the other. That bowl was seized from David Swetnam, an American convicted in Los Angeles last year on a charge involving the smuggling of Moche artifacts into the United States.

Other items were voluntarily returned by Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Caltech and a collector of pre-Columbian art who said he had bought the artifacts in good faith.

The exhibitions include a full-size model of the tomb of the Lord of Sipan, discovered by Peruvian archeologist Walter Alva two years ago and considered one of the most important ancient tombs ever discovered intact in the Americas.

Alva himself assembled the reconstruction, finishing the job just half an hour before the opening festivities. “It is not the best work we could have done, but with the time and resources, it is very good,” he said. “It’s a beginning.”

That is true of much of the museum so far. Some displays lack detailed descriptions, and English translations have not yet been prepared, said museum spokesman Eduardo Mejia. However, he promised that such details will be resolved before the public opening.

Roughly following a chronological circuit, visitors pass through models and exhibitions of the early Mito culture, the Chavin era, the Ica and Nazca periods and the more recent Moche, Wari and Chimu empires. Along with gold and ceramics are examples of the rare textiles, including clothing and shawls, found in some tombs, and models of houses from several periods.

An entire section is devoted to the famed Incas, who ruled the region when the Spaniards arrived. An intricate, 30-foot-wide model of Machu Picchu illustrates the mountaintop stronghold of the Incas near Cuzco. Future exhibits are planned on the history of Lima, mining and technology, as well as comparative displays on contemporaneous cultures elsewhere in the world.

Garcia said that the museum captures “the cadence of our history.” In years to come, he said, it would serve as an “affirmation of continuity and unity.”

The Museo de la Nacion is between downtown and the suburb of Miraflores, at Javier Prado Este 2465, San Borja. Museum hours are 8 a.m. to noon. Open every day.

Many of the best and safest hotels are in this area. Central Lima is rife with pickpockets and muggers, so leave valuables in hotel safe-deposit boxes and don’t wear expensive watches or jewelry.