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Science and the Enlightenment

A center of scientific inquiry.

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To the Spanish conquerors there was much that was literally new about the New World, and efforts to understand and describe its vast array of unknown plants and animals began even before the conquest was concluded. Peru, a center of intellectual life, was far from being the remote backwater intellectually stunted by the Inquisition, as 19th-century historians represented it. As the age of Enlightenment dawned, Lima shared many of its characteristics with European cities, such as newspapers and scientific explorations.