- For other uses, see Callao (disambiguation).
| City of Callao
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Callao_coat_of_arms.png
Coat of Arms
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| City motto: "Chim Pum Callao"
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| Data
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| Area | 146.98 km²
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Population
  -Total
  -Density |
799 530 (2003 estimate)
4 649/km²
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| Districts | 6
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| Location | 12°02'42" South 77°08'25" West
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| Politics
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| Mayor | Rogelio Canches Guzmán
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The city of El Callao is the port of Lima, Peru. It was founded in 1537, just two years after Lima (1535), and soon became the main port for Spanish commerce in the Pacific. At the height of the Viceroyalty, virtually all goods produced in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina were carried over the Andes by mule to Callao, to be shipped to Panama, carried overland, and then transported on to Spain via Cuba.
In 1746, an earthquake caused a tsunami which destroyed the entire port.
In the naval Battle of Callao, the Spanish fleet tried to reconquer independent Peru.
An historical fortress, the Castillo de Real Felipe, still stands on the promontory. There is also a large naval base in Callao, in which the leader of Sendero Luminoso rebel movement, Abimael Guzmán, and Vladimiro Montesinos, the ex-director of internal security during the Fujimori regime are imprisoned.
On a bluff overlooking the ocean sits Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado, the military high school Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa attended and made famous in his first novel, La Ciudad y los Perros (1962) (published in English as The Time of the Hero in 1963). The book was later filmed as The City and the Dogs and featured exterior shots of the school.
The city, although contiguous with metropolitan Lima, is part of a separate region, the Callao region. Lima's international airport Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chavez is located in El Callao. El Callao is built on and around a peninsula, the district of La Punta, which used to be the old high class Italian immigrant neighborhood, but now a days is rather run down and considered highly snobbish. El Callao also has a few islands near that peninsula, called San Lorenzo Island, a military base nowadays and former jail of Abimael Guzmán; El Frontón Island, a former high security prison; Cavinzas Islands and Palomino Islands (http://www.islaspalomino.com), where a large number of sea lions and sea birds live in a virtually untouched ecosystem.
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