Lima Region

Lima Region wraps the central Peruvian coast around the metropolitan capital, with the open Pacific shoreline running from the Chillón river mouth at the northern edge through Callao's working port and the long Costa Verde cliff line south past Miraflores, Barranco, and Chorrillos toward the surf coast at Punta Hermosa and Punta Negra. The tide here is a small mixed semidiurnal signal characteristic of open Pacific coasts at this latitude. Mean range at the Callao gauge is about 0.7 metres, climbing past 1.0 metre on the largest spring tides and dropping near 0.4 on neaps. The pattern is two highs and two lows of unequal size each day, with the difference between the higher high and the lower low varying through the lunar month. The defining oceanographic feature is not the tide range but the cold Humboldt Current that sweeps north along the coast from the Antarctic — sea-surface temperatures stay between 14 and 19 degrees year-round at this latitude despite the equatorial position, and the cold-water upwelling that the current drives feeds the largest single-species fishery on Earth: the anchoveta industrial fleet that supplies Peruvian fish meal. The garúa coastal fog season from May through November and the El Niño cycle that periodically warms the surface and collapses the anchoveta catch both shape the working calendar. Surfers at Punta Hermosa, Cerro Azul, and the long left at Chicama further north read the swell more than the tide; ceviche-house fish suppliers at the Villa María del Triunfo wholesale market read the boat-return calendar. The Dirección de Hidrografía y Navegación (DHN) publishes the authoritative Peruvian tide tables; Open-Meteo Marine drives the gridded predictions on this site.