Most visitors to Lima's Colonial Centre get a tantalizing glimpse of a district that starkly reflects Lima's contrasts. Visible just north of the Presidential Palace and San Francisco Monastery, across the natural boundary of early Colonial Lima, the Rimac River, is the district named after the river. 

Being so close to Peru's post-Conquest heart, the area has a number of interesting and historic attractions, but it is also evidence of the rapid, chaotic, urban growth that characterizes much of Lima from the 1960s onwards.