Lima's Climate? Bad Or Worse, Locals Lament

SUN IS RARE in Peru's capital in the winter. Depression is rampant and suicide rates increase as the gray weather takes hold. It's so bad, Limenos have a term for the irritability they feel - "abulia." The humid air, which is never cleaned by rain, retains many pollutants and causes high occurrences of asthma.

LIMA, Peru - These are the days that "Limenos" dread.

The inhabitants of this sprawling city of 8 million on Peru's arid Pacific coast are deep into the Southern Hemisphere's winter - and counting the times they've seen the sun in recent months.

Because of its location close to the equator, Lima should have a hot, sunny, tropical climate.

It doesn't.

"Lima has two seasons - bad and worse. The sun never shines, and it's depressing as hell," grumbles Jim Hunt, an oil man from the Texas Panhandle who has lived in Peru for three years.

He exaggerates only slightly.

During the winter months, a persistent fog rolls in from the Pacific, blanketing the city with a bone-chilling dampness and enveloping it in a melancholy that has inspired writers for centuries.

Despite humidity that can reach 99 percent, Lima never experiences rainstorms. The juxtaposition of the Andes range, almost hugging the ocean, and the cold Humboldt Current churning northward off Peru's coast blocks rain.

Between May and October, sunny days are rare. Winter skies are depressingly gray.

Lima winters are notorious for their grimness. Depression abounds, the suicide rate increases and everyone experiences a tired feeling of irritability. Peruvians have a word for the feeling - "abulia."

They also have a word for the fog hanging over the capital - "garua." When the sun shines through the garua unexpectedly on a winter day, as it did last week for a few hours, the pace of life on the streets quickens, people shed layers of clothing and for a moment the city casts off its prison garb of winter gray.

One visitor in the last century, naturalist Charles Darwin, carried away a bleak vision of Lima's peculiar weather. In his "Voyage of the Beagle," Darwin wrote: "A dull heavy bank of clouds constantly hung over the land, so that during the first 16 days I had only one view of the Cordillera behind Lima . . . . During almost every day of our visit there was a thick drizzling mist, which was sufficient to make the streets muddy and one's clothes damp: This the people are pleased to call Peruvian dew."

Visitors today to Lima immediately notice the large number of asthma clinics that dot the city, a testimony to one of the world's unhealthiest climates. Asthma is common because the humid air, which is never cleaned by rain, retains all kinds of pollutants that irritate the lungs.

In the past few years, clinics also have sprouted to treat patients suffering from seasonal depression by putting them under sun lamps for intensive light therapy.

Antonio Chavez is an agronomist from Arequipa, a city in the foothills of the Andes in southern Peru that enjoys year-round sunshine.

"This continuous mist the color of a donkey's belly causes a great nostalgia in me for my homeland," Chavez says as he drinks a steaming cup of "emoliente," a herbal brew said to ward off the ills brought by the "garua."

"Thank God just as we are at the point of suicide, we get a bit of sunshine," he said. "I've been living in Lima for 40 years, and I'm still not used to its weather. Who's going to get used to it?"