About Larco Museum
The Museo Larco in Lima was founded in 1926 by Rafael Larco Hoyle in a restored 18th-century viceregal mansion in the Pueblo Libre district. The museum holds one of the world's greatest collections of pre-Columbian art — over 45,000 pieces spanning 5,000 years of ancient Peruvian civilisation, from the Chavín culture through the Moche, Wari, Chimú, and Inca empires.
The collection's greatest distinction is the open storeroom: a set of galleries behind the main museum where the entire reserve collection is displayed openly — hundreds of thousands of additional pieces visible to visitors in climate-controlled storage. The Moche erotic pottery gallery, documenting the sexual culture of the Moche civilisation (AD 100–800), is the most famous gallery in the museum, though the gold and silver room (Sala de los metales) — with its extraordinary Moche gold jewellery and ritual objects — is equally extraordinary.
Collections & Highlights
Frequently Asked Questions
A small ask before you go
You've just explored one of humanity's greatest collections of beauty. Art has the power to move us, inspire us, and change how we see the world. But millions of people will never see beauty like this — not because the art isn't there, but because they can't see at all.
Preventable blindness, caused by conditions like cataracts and trachoma, affects people of all ages across the world's poorest communities. A small gift — for the cost of a museum ticket — can provide a simple surgery to restore someone's sight and transform their life.