PERU · SOUTH AMERICA
Inca stone, high Andes, and the cloud forest beyond.
Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley, the Inca Trail and Rainbow Mountain, Lake Titicaca, the Colca canyon condors and the Amazon. Cusco, Lima, Arequipa and the desert coast in between.
Only here
Three days you can't have anywhere else.
Markets, ruins and mountain views turn up all over South America. A lost Inca city in the clouds, a desert drawn for the gods, and a village that floats on woven reed do not.
The lost city
Machu Picchu
The Spanish never found it. Hiram Bingham climbed onto the ridge in 1911 to find an entire Inca city wrapped in cloud forest, its terraces and temples standing where the empire left them. Catch it at dawn, when the mist lifts off Huayna Picchu and the stonework comes up gold.
- 1 From Cusco: Full-Day Group Tour of Machu Picchu
- 2 Machu Picchu Day Trip from Cusco
- 3 Machu Picchu: Full-Day Tour from Cusco with Optional Lunch
Drawn for the sky
The Nazca Lines
Two thousand years ago the Nazca scored a hummingbird, a monkey and a spider into the desert floor, each one hundreds of metres across and only readable from the air. Nobody is certain why. A light plane banks low over the pampa so you can look down and wonder along with everyone else.
- 1 From Nazca: 35-Minute Flight Over Nazca Lines
- 2 Lima: Ballestas & Huacachina Day Trip w/ Nazca Lines Flight
- 3 Private Tour to the Astonished Nazca Lines and Huacachina Oasis
Built on reeds
The Uros Islands
On the highest navigable lake on earth, the Uros people live on islands they weave themselves from totora reed and re-layer by hand as the old reed rots beneath. You step off the boat onto soft golden ground that gives underfoot, 3,800 metres up, and floats.
- 1 From Puno: Uros, Amantaní & Taquile Islands 2-Day Tour
- 2 From Puno: Floating Islands of the Uros Half-Day Tour
- 3 Lake Titicaca 2-Day Tour to Uros, Amantani and Taquile
Start here
The one most Peru trips are built around.
More travellers book this than anything else on the site, the day that lands on nearly every first Peru itinerary.
The classics
Peru's Most Popular Tours
Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley, Rainbow Mountain and the Colca canyon. The days most travellers come to Peru for.
Where to begin
The trips a Peru itinerary is built around.
Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley, the Inca Trail, Rainbow Mountain, the Colca condors and Lake Titicaca. The handful of trips most journeys are planned around, and the best way to do each.
The big question
How to reach Machu Picchu.
There is no road to the citadel, so the how is the first thing to plan. Three ways up from Cusco and the Sacred Valley, by train or on foot, depending on your time and your legs.
The Sacred Valley
The Inca heartland, an hour from Cusco.
The Urubamba river runs through a warm, green valley the Incas farmed in terraces and crowned with the fortress-towns of Pisac and Ollantaytambo. Add the white salt pans of Maras and the circular terraces of Moray, and it is both the best place to acclimatise and the run-up to Machu Picchu itself.
Read the guide: the best Sacred Valley tours →Lima & Cusco
Peru eats better than anywhere.
Lima is routinely called the best food city on the continent: ceviche cured in lime and chilli, pisco sours, and tasting menus built from ingredients that grow nowhere else. Up in Cusco the markets pile high with a thousand kinds of potato, and a cooking class turns the haul into lunch.
See the food & market tours →Colca Canyon
Twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.
Three hours from Arequipa the earth splits open more than three thousand metres down, terraced by the same families for a thousand years. At the Cruz del Condor the giant Andean condor rides the morning thermals up out of the gorge, close enough to hear the wind in its wings.
Colca Canyon tours →The Amazon
Drop off the map for a few days.
More than half of Peru is rainforest. A short flight from Cusco to Puerto Maldonado, then a boat up the Madre de Dios to a lodge with no road in: macaws at the clay lick, caiman eyes in the torchlight, monkeys in the canopy at dawn. Iquitos opens the deeper, wilder north.
- 1 Tambopata Peruvian Amazon Jungle for Three Days/Two Nights
- 2 Puerto Maldonado: Sandoval Lake 4-Day, 3-Night Guided Tour
- 3 Belen Market and La Venecia Loretana Tour With A Local Guide
By altitude
From sea level to five thousand metres.
Peru is the first thing your lungs will notice. Start low on the coast, find your breath in the valleys around Cusco, then save the high passes for once you have acclimatised.
Sea level
The desert coast.Lima and its kitchens, the sea lions of the Ballestas, the Nazca Lines and the dune oasis at Huacachina. No altitude, all sun.
The valleys · 2,800-3,400m
Where you find your breath.Cusco, the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu sit high but liveable. A day or two here is how you acclimatise before the real climbs.
Thin air · above 5,000m
Up where the glaciers were.Rainbow Mountain, the Salkantay pass and the Colca rim. The thin-air days you save for last, once your lungs have caught up.
Huacachina
A dune buggy over the desert at sunset.
Five hours south of Lima, a real palm-fringed oasis sits in a bowl of sand dunes that rise hundreds of metres. Buggies tear up and over the crests at full throttle, then stop at the top so you can sandboard back down as the sun drops and the whole desert turns gold.
See all 21 desert tours →By place
Pick your corner of Peru.
Cusco for the Incas and the high country. Lima for the coast and the food. Arequipa for the white city and the canyon. Puno for Lake Titicaca. Paracas and Ica for the desert. Puerto Maldonado for the Amazon.
By activity
Pick how you want to travel.
Ruins if you came for the Incas. A trek if you want to earn the view. A flight over the desert lines. A boat on the lake, a buggy on the dunes, or a long lunch in Lima.
Plan it
Three days in the Inca heartland.
Most first trips begin in Cusco. Here is the core loop in the order the altitude wants it, low to high, with nothing wasted.
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