Nearly 200,000 people in Peru have Croatian ancestry, and a new agreement in Lima is about to make finding their family stories far simpler.
On Monday, Peru's National Superintendence of Migration signed a cooperation deal with the Dubrovnik association, the organisation representing Croatian emigrants in the capital. Signed by migration official Luis Yunis Herrera and association president Iván Orlic, the pact covers the collection and preservation of historical records tied to Croatian immigration, and crucially, gives descendants easier access to documents about their own families.
It's the latest step in a busy year for the project. In January, Peru's General Archive and the Dubrovnik association agreed to digitise and catalogue records of Croatians in the country dating from the 16th to the 20th century. February brought talks with the Migration Superintendence about handling its own holdings. Now that institution has formally come on board.
One of the biggest beneficiaries is Naša Veza Perú, a digital platform built by Ana María Kuljevan, Croatia's honorary consul in Peru, and launched in Lima a year ago. It pulls together documents, photographs and institutional records that sketch out the lives of Croatian immigrants and their families. Users can search by surname and dig into their origins — including the tricky cases where names were changed or written down differently over generations. The platform runs in Spanish, Croatian and English, and earned Kuljevan a Croatian Women's Network award for leadership and innovation in 2023.
For anyone with Croatian-Peruvian heritage — or with family links to any diaspora community, really — this is a genuinely useful development. Government archives are often the only place the paper trail survives, and getting formal access to migration records can break through brick walls that years of private research can't. The model behind Naša Veza Perú could eventually spread to other countries with Croatian communities, especially elsewhere in Latin America.
There's also a travel angle. Root-tracing trips have become one of the fastest-growing reasons people travel, and Peru makes a rewarding destination for one: combine days in archives and old neighbourhoods in Lima with Cusco, the Sacred Valley or the Amazon. If your surname appears in a 19th-century passenger manifest, that document often points to a specific port, town or parish worth visiting on both sides of the Atlantic.
For now, the immediate takeaway is simple: if your family tree has Croatian roots in Peru, the paperwork just got a lot easier to reach.
