Peru's inbound tourism earned a record $5.35 billion in 2025 — 10% up on the year and 14% above the pre-pandemic best — from travelers who stay ten nights and spend $1,232, with Lima's restaurants leading the capture.
The headline of Peruvian tourism is a paradox: arrivals are a fifth below 2019, receipts a seventh above it. The sector pivoted from volume to value — premium lodges, culinary itineraries, adventure niches — and the arithmetic works: $5.35 billion from 3.42 million visitors beats $4.7 billion from 4.37 million. Tourism now delivers 3.3% of GDP, still short of its 3.9% pre-pandemic share, which the industry reads as headroom, not decline.
Beneath the inbound ledger runs a huge domestic engine: Peruvians made 44 million domestic trips in the last full count, spending an estimated $12 billion — up 6.5% year on year — with Lima as both the biggest origin and a rising destination for provincial families who come for the coast, the malls and the same restaurants the world flies in for.
Gastronomy is the spend engine with no off-season: Peru's cuisine is the single most cited motivation among its high-spend visitors, and a Lima food budget stretches absurdly far — a tasting menu at a world No. 1 runs a fraction of Paris or New York, while the cevichería lunch, the anticuchos stand and the pisco sour add texture at street prices. This is the rare capital where the top of the market and the bottom are both the attraction.
For the traveler the city is priced kindly: five-star rooms in Miraflores well under comparable Southern Cone capitals, museum tickets in single digits, the Metropolitano at 90 cents. The splurges that are worth it: one world-50 table, a Barranco boutique night, a private car for the Pachacamac ruins. The splurge that isn't: airport exchange booths — the sol is better bought downtown.
Our read: budget Lima as a food destination with a hotel attached, not the reverse. Put the money into two great tables and the Barranco nights; save it on transport and rooms, which underprice themselves. The record receipts mean the secret is out at the top end — Maido and Central will not get easier — but the middle of this market, the menús and the markets, remains the best-value eating on the continent. Come before the 2031 recovery catches up with the prices.
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