San Vicente de Cañete

San Vicente de Cañete, commonly called San Vicente or Cañete, is a city and the capital of Cañete Province in the southern Lima Region of Peru, with an estimated population of 85,533 in 2015. It lies 144 kilometres, about an hour and a half, south of Lima and serves tourists mainly as a gateway to the Lunahuaná District. The Plaza de Armas is on 2 de Mayo, a few blocks inland from the stop on the Pan-American Highway where buses pause, and every bus along that highway passes through the city. Cañete is one of the most important homes of pisco, the best-known spirit of Peru. The first inhabitants of these lands were the Huarcos; later the area was settled by descendants of slaves who came from Guinea, the Congo and Angola in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to work the cotton and sugar cane fields and the vineyards. Cerro Azul is a district north of the centre, and the Asia district has beaches where people from Lima rent houses.