It was established in
Lima on 5 May 1887 as a corresponding academy to the
Real Academia Española. On 30 August of the same year, its first public session was held in the assembly hall of the
National University of San Marcos, where
Francisco García Calderón, a former
President of Peru, was elected as its first president. Although it was formally established in 1887, its inauguration had been delayed due to the
War of the Pacific: during the
Chilean occupation of Lima, a large portion of the books from the
National Library of Peru were taken to Chile as war spoils. This event led
Ricardo Palma to prioritize the reconstruction of the National Library, setting aside earlier plans to inaugurate the APL. García Calderón was succeeded by Ricardo Palma, first as president and later as director. Palma was a staunch defender of
peruanismos (Peru-specific Spanish usages), which he documented in his works
Papeletas lexicográficas and
Neologismos y americanismos, and lobbied the
Real Academia Española to formally accept them. Among its members is
Mario Vargas Llosa, recipient of the
Premio Cervantes (1994) and the
Nobel Prize in Literature (2010), who also held a seat at the
Real Academia Española. Other notable members have included
Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, Guillermo Hoyos Osores,
Augusto Tamayo Vargas,
Luis Jaime Cisneros, and Aurelio and Francisco Miró Quesada. In the field of
Quechua linguistics as it relates to Peruvian Spanish,
Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino has been a key contributor, while
Martha Hildebrandt specialised in
peruanismos — particularly Lima-specific usages and archaisms — publishing her findings in the Lima newspaper
El Comercio. The current president is
Harry Belevan, elected to succeed Eduardo Hopkins Rodríguez. The Academy hosted the VIII International Congress of the
Association of Spanish Language Academies in 1980. == Members ==