Peru Machu Picchu + Sacred Valley

About this pack

Inca Trail or train to Machu Picchu, Pisac, Ollantaytambo.

Inside the Peru Machu Picchu + Sacred Valley trip

This trip opens in Cusco, capital of the Cusco Department in southeastern Peru near the confluence of the Huatanay and Urubamba rivers, historically one of the country's largest cultural, economic, and political centres. The Killke culture inhabited the region from the tenth century, building the fortress of Sacsayhuamán in the eleventh, before the city was founded in the twelfth century by Manco Cápac as capital of the Kingdom of Cusco and later of the Inca Empire; after Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century the city was reestablished on 23 March 1534, largely built over Inca-era monuments, and UNESCO named it a World Heritage Site in 1983 under the title "City of Cusco." The indigenous name Qusqu is thought to derive from the Aymara phrase qusqu wanka, "rock of the owl," tied to a foundation legend in which the Ayar sibling Ayar Auca is said to have flown to the site on wings before turning to stone to mark the land for his lineage, after which his brother took the name Manco Cápac.

From Cusco, the trip reaches Machu Picchu, a fifteenth-century Inca citadel on a mountain ridge at 2,430 metres, about 80 kilometres northwest of the city above the Sacred Valley. Radiocarbon dating from a 2021 study led by Yale anthropologist Richard L. Burger places its occupation between roughly 1420 and 1530, and it is generally believed to have been built as a royal estate under the Inca emperor Pachacutec after his conquest of the region, though no contemporary written record confirms this. Built in classical Inca style with finely cut dry-stone walls, the site includes the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Three Windows, and the Intihuatana ritual stone, and its name, from Quechua machu and pikchu, translates roughly as "old peak" — a label a 2021 study suggests was only attached to the ruins after the American explorer Hiram Bingham's 1911 publications.

The trip's exploration of the Sacred Valley, or Urubamba Valley, follows a stretch of fertile land irrigated by the Urubamba River running roughly from Pisac to Ollantaytambo. First farmed by the Chanapata civilisation from around 800 BCE, the valley was later home to the Qotacalla culture from 500 to 900 CE and the Killke culture from 900 CE until its absorption into the Inca Empire around 1420; its lower elevation, ranging from 3,000 metres at Pisac to 2,050 metres near Machu Picchu, made it warm enough for the Inca to grow maize, a prestige crop used to brew chicha, even as the valley floor sits beneath peaks including Sahuasiray at 5,818 metres and Veronica at 5,893 metres.

The trip's final excursion climbs Vinicunca, also called Montaña de Siete Colores or Rainbow Mountain, a peak in the Cusco region reaching 5,036 metres, reached by a roughly two-hour drive from Cusco followed by a walk of about 5 kilometres. Its banded colours come from its mineral composition: pink from red clay and sand, white from quartz-rich sandstone and marl, red from iron-bearing claystone of the Upper Tertiary period, green from ferromagnesian phyllite and clay, brown from a Quaternary fanglomerate, and mustard yellow from sulphur-rich calcareous sandstone. The mountain was covered by glacier caps until they melted in 2013, after which its exposed colours drew a wave of mass tourism from the mid-2010s onward.

• Cusco — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Machu Picchu — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Sacred Valley — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Vinicunca — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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Peru Machu Picchu + Sacred Valley, in frame

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