Casa de Aliaga stands beside Lima's governmental center on land granted in 1535 to Jerónimo de Aliaga, a Spanish captain who accompanied Francisco Pizarro during conquest. The house is widely described as the oldest continuously inhabited colonial family residence in the Americas. That continuity refers to ownership and occupation by descendants, not to an unchanged sixteenth-century structure. Earthquakes, fashions, family needs, and urban development repeatedly transformed rooms, façades, courtyards, stairs, and decoration.

The property formed part of the new colonial capital laid out over and beside Indigenous settlements and sacred landscapes. Aliaga's status came from conquest, royal grants, officeholding, and the unequal distribution of land and labor. Indigenous and African-descended workers, including enslaved people, built, maintained, cleaned, supplied, and served elite households like this one. Their labor is less visible than portraits and furnishings but is essential to understanding how colonial domestic life and family wealth operated.

Successive generations adapted the residence with carved wooden balconies, tiled rooms, salons, service spaces, art, and furnishings reflecting changing baroque, rococo, republican, and modern tastes. Major earthquakes in Lima required repair and rebuilding, meaning older foundations and fragments coexist with later construction. The house's location near the former viceregal palace kept the family close to government and ceremony while the surrounding city became more crowded, commercial, and socially diverse.

The privately owned house remains occupied and opens through controlled guided visits. Its furniture and artworks include objects accumulated or installed in different periods, so displays should not be read as a complete 1535 interior. Conservation must support modern living, security, utilities, accessibility, and fire protection without erasing architectural evidence. Documentation of each repair is especially important because continuous family care can preserve a site while also making historical phases difficult to distinguish.

Casa de Aliaga is significant for exceptional continuity across conquest, viceroyalty, independence, republic, and modern Lima. Interpretation should balance family history with Indigenous dispossession, slavery, domestic work, earthquakes, and urban change. The claim of oldest continuous residence is most meaningful when explained critically rather than used as a slogan. Conservation should protect courtyards, timber, adobe, collections, archives, and archaeological deposits while researching the servants and workers who sustained the household but rarely entered elite genealogies. Conservation planning should document which walls, patios, balconies, finishes, and objects belong to each major campaign. Family archives, archaeology, and research into servants and enslaved residents can broaden the narrative beyond architectural continuity, revealing how one household repeatedly adjusted to earthquakes, independence, urban growth, and changing ideas of status.