Peru For other uses, see Peru (disambiguation). Peru (Quechua: Piruw, Aymara: Piruw), officially the Republic of Peru is a country located on the western side of South America, whose territory borders the Pacific Ocean to the west and bounded on the north with Ecuador, northeastern Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia and southern Chile. It has a complex geography is dominated by the elevations of the Andes and the Pacific currents, which makes him climates and landscapes as widely varied as the desert coast, the highlands of the high Andes and the rainforest of the Amazon basin, all environments that shape the country as a land of great variety of natural resources. The heterogeneity of geographic and climatic rigors of the country led to the first settlers early Peruvians to the twelfth millennium BC C.to adapt by developing one of the widest range of cultural traditions, as the oldest civilization of Caral that five thousand years ago, around the production cycles of each region, many of which resulted in a regional theocratic states. In early second century C., states began to be played, by periods, control of the peoples of the Andes. By the sixteenth century, the later and vast domain of these States, the Inca Empire was annexed by the Spanish conquerors with the support of dissident ethnic groups to Inca. The Spanish crown and established a viceroyalty that included most of its South American colonies. In 1821 the country became independent, basing a state that was immersed in periods of internal and external conflicts alternating periods of economic prosperity.The Peruvian population, estimated at more than 28 million people (2008), is multiethnic and mestizo important indigenous substrate which had become European ancestry, African and Asian, its mixture of cultural traditions has resulted in a wide diversity of expressions in fields such as art, literature, music and cuisine. The main and most widely spoken language is Spanish, although a significant number of Peruvians speak different native languages Quechua languages, with the largest number of speakers. It is a developing country with a high Human Development Index but even with economic inequality that has been improving their revenue and decrease their level of poverty significantly in recent years. Their main economic activities include agriculture, fisheries, mining and manufacturing of products like textiles.Politically, the country has organized a representative democratic republic with a multiparty political system structured on the principles of separation of powers and decentralization. It dividide in 25 regional constituencies (24 departments and the Constitutional Province of Callao).