City highlights of Callo

Callao is built on and around a peninsula, the district of La Punta, once a wealthy residential neighborhood. An historical fortress, the Castillo de Real Felipe (site of “Rodil’s Last Stand”), stands on the promontory overlooking the harbor.

There is also a large naval base in Callao, in which the leader of the Shining Path rebel movement, Abimael Guzman, and Vladimiro Montesinos, the ex-director of internal security during the Fujimori regime are currently imprisoned. Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport is located in Callao.

On a bluff overlooking the harbor 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 also has a university, the National University of Callao.

Callao also several islands, San Lorenzo (currently a military base), El Fronton (a former high security prison), the Cavinzas, and the Palominos, where a large number of sea lions and sea birds live in a virtually untouched ecosystem. Residents of Callao are known as chalacos.