Cajamarca

Cajamarca is the capital of Peru's Cajamarca Region, in the northern highlands at about 2,750 meters elevation in the Mashcon river valley. An estimated 226,031 people lived there in 2015, making it Peru's 13th largest city. The city is best known as the site of the 1532 Battle of Cajamarca, when the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro captured and later executed the Inca emperor Atahualpa, a turning point in the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. Cajamarca today is a center of dairy farming and mining, including the Yanacocha gold mine, and retains Spanish colonial religious architecture alongside pre-Hispanic archaeological sites.