Explore Peru

Lima

South America's largest Pacific capital is a city that refuses to be one thing — colonial churches in the historic centre, clifftop Miraflores with its paragliders and cevicherías, and a restaurant scene (Central, Maido, Astrid y Gastón) that has made it the continent's gastronomic capital. The Larco Museum's pre-Columbian gold alone is worth the flight.

Cusco

The once-capital of the Inca Empire sits at 3,400 m in the Andes, its cobblestone streets weaving between Inca stone foundations topped with Spanish baroque churches. The Plaza de Armas buzzes day and night, and every alley leads to a ruin, a market, or a craft workshop — making Cusco one of the most historically layered cities in the Americas.

Machu Picchu Pueblo

Known officially as Aguas Calientes, this mountain town at the base of Machu Picchu is where the world comes to sleep before dawn and ride the shuttle up to the citadel. The hot springs the town is named for offer welcome relief after a full day on the Inca terraces above.

Arequipa

Built almost entirely of white volcanic sillar stone, Arequipa earns its nickname La Ciudad Blanca beneath the perpetual cone of El Misti volcano. The Santa Catalina Monastery — a walled city within a city — is one of the most extraordinary colonial complexes in the Americas, and the surrounding valleys produce some of Peru's finest cheeses and alpaca textiles.

Puno

Perched on the shores of Lake Titicaca at 3,830 m, Puno is the gateway to the floating reed islands of the Uros people and the Taquile Island with its UNESCO-recognised textile tradition. The city itself comes alive during the Candelaria festival in February, with weeks of elaborate masked dances drawing visitors from across the continent.

Trujillo

The colonial city on Peru's north coast is flanked by two of the greatest pre-Columbian ruins in the Americas: Chan Chan, the largest adobe city in the world and a UNESCO site, and the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna, the massive Moche ceremonial pyramids. Nearby Huanchaco village is where ancient reed-boat surfing (caballitos de totora) survives into the present day.

Huaraz

Surrounded by the Cordillera Blanca — the world's highest tropical mountain range — Huaraz is the trekking capital of the Andes, with trails past glacier lakes and 6,000 m peaks accessible from guesthouses in town. The Santa Cruz trek and the Laguna 69 hike draw serious walkers from around the world.

Iquitos

The world's largest city unreachable by road, Iquitos sits deep in the Peruvian Amazon and is only accessible by river or air. It's the launchpad for rainforest lodges along the Amazon, Napo, and Marañón rivers, where pink river dolphins, giant river otters, and caimans are regular sights on guided canoe excursions.

Nazca

The plains south of this desert town hold the world-famous Nazca Lines — enormous geoglyphs of hummingbirds, monkeys, and spider figures etched into the pampa by the Nazca culture 2,000 years ago and only fully visible from the air. Overflights leave from the small airport just outside town and last around 30 minutes.

Paracas

This small coastal town on the Paracas Peninsula is the departure point for boat trips to the Ballestas Islands, a Galápagos-like spectacle of sea lions, Humboldt penguins, and thousands of seabirds just offshore. The Paracas National Reserve's red desert cliffs dropping into the Pacific make for some of the most dramatic coastal scenery on the continent.

Ollantaytambo

Guarding the entrance to the Sacred Valley with one of the most impressive Inca fortresses still standing, Ollantaytambo is the last living Inca town in Peru — residents still use the ancient street grid and water channels. It's also the main train station for Machu Picchu, making it a natural overnight stop with far more charm than Aguas Calientes.

Pisac

The Sunday market at Pisac in the Sacred Valley is Peru's most famous artisan market, drawing buyers from Cusco and beyond for textiles, ceramics, and silver. The Inca ruins above the village — terraced agricultural platforms cascading down a mountain ridge — rival anything in the region for sheer scale and setting.

Máncora

Peru's most celebrated beach resort stretches along a strip of warm Pacific coast in the far north, with consistent waves that attract surfers and a year-round beach scene rare for a country where most of the coast is shrouded in fog. The long sandy beach, seafood restaurants on the shore, and party hostels make it the natural end point of a gringo trail south from Ecuador.

Puerto Maldonado

The gateway to the Madre de Dios Amazon region and the Tambopata National Reserve, Puerto Maldonado is where jungle lodges begin. The area has the highest biodiversity on the planet — macaws, tapirs, giant anteaters, and hundreds of butterfly species live within a short boat ride of town.

Chachapoyas

Perched in cloud-forested mountains in northern Peru, this small colonial town is the base for visiting Kuelap — a massive pre-Inca fortress of the Chachapoya people that predates Machu Picchu by 500 years. The dramatic Gocta waterfall, one of the world's tallest, is a two-hour hike from a nearby village and remains refreshingly crowd-free.

Huacachina

A natural oasis of emerald water surrounded by towering sand dunes, Huacachina is one of South America's most photogenic spots — and increasingly one of its most adventurous. Sandboarding down 100 m dunes and dune-buggy rides at sunset have turned this tiny lagoon into one of Peru's most popular short stops.

Chiclayo

The 'City of Friendship' in northern Peru is the gateway to some of South America's richest archaeological sites — the tomb of the Lord of Sipán, a Moche ruler buried with gold treasures rivalling Tutankhamun's, was discovered just outside the city in 1987. The excellent Tumbas Reales museum displays the find in context.

Ayacucho

Known as the City of Churches for its 33 colonial churches built by the Spanish on Inca foundations, Ayacucho is one of the Andes' most authentically preserved colonial cities — and one of its least visited by foreign tourists. The Easter celebrations here are considered the most elaborate in Latin America, with processions running for over a week.

The most visited archaeological site in the Americas, Machu Picchu is an Inca citadel set on a cloud-forest ridge at 2,430 m above the Urubamba Valley, built in the 15th century and abandoned within a century of Spanish arrival. Its remarkable state of preservation — dry-stone terraces, temples, and astronomical alignments intact — earned it both UNESCO status and New Seven Wonders recognition.

Once the capital of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire, Cusco's historic centre layers Spanish baroque architecture directly onto Inca stone foundations — the Cathedral stands on the base of Inca Viracocha's palace. The city was the political and spiritual heart of the largest empire in pre-Columbian America and remains the cultural centre of the Andes today.

Drawn on the desert floor between 500 BCE and 500 CE by the Nazca culture, these enormous geoglyphs — including a hummingbird 93 m across, a monkey with a spiral tail, and a spider — remain one of archaeology's great mysteries. The flat, windless pampa has preserved them perfectly for 2,000 years; they are only fully visible from the air.

The largest pre-Columbian city in South America, Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú Empire from 900 to 1470 CE, housing an estimated 30,000 people within its 20 sq km of adobe palaces, temples, and residential compounds. Its intricate geometric friezes of fish, waves, and birds remain vivid on walls that have stood for nearly a millennium.

Encompassing the Cordillera Blanca — the world's highest tropical mountain range — Huascarán National Park protects 340,000 hectares of glaciers, high-altitude lakes (including the turquoise Laguna 69), and Andean condors soaring over 6,768 m peaks. The park is named for Peru's highest summit and offers some of the most dramatic trekking on the continent.

Spanning cloud forest and Amazonian lowlands across 1.5 million hectares, Manu is considered one of the most biodiverse places on Earth — researchers have recorded more species of birds and butterflies here than in any other park of comparable size. Large mammals including giant river otters, tapirs, and jaguars move through habitats that range from 4,000 m Andean peaks to the floodplains of the Madre de Dios.

The temple complex at Chavín de Huántar, built around 900 BCE in the Andean highlands, was a major religious centre for a cult that spread its iconography — the fanged Chavín deity — across the northern Andes. Its underground galleries, carved stone lintels, and the monolithic Lanzón stela represent one of the earliest complex civilisations in South America.

Founded by Francisco Pizarro in 1535 as the 'City of Kings', Lima's colonial centre retains one of the finest ensembles of Spanish baroque architecture in the Americas, including the Cathedral, the Archbishop's Palace, and the Church of San Francisco with its elaborate churrigueresque façade. The catacombs beneath San Francisco hold the remains of an estimated 70,000 people.

Built almost entirely from white volcanic sillar stone quarried from the slopes of the El Misti volcano, Arequipa's colonial centre is one of the most architecturally distinctive in Latin America. The Santa Catalina Monastery — a walled compound of plazas, painted alleys, and cells occupied by cloistered nuns for three centuries — is its centrepiece.

Deep in the cloud forests of northern Peru, Rio Abiseo protects both exceptional biodiversity — including the yellow-tailed woolly monkey, thought extinct until rediscovered here — and 36 pre-Columbian archaeological sites. The ruins at Gran Pajatén, a circular stone complex decorated with friezes, were built by the Chachapoya culture and are accessible only after days of jungle trekking.

Dating to 2600–2000 BCE, Caral is the oldest known city in the Americas — a contemporary of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia — with monumental platform mounds, sunken circular plazas, and evidence of a complex urban society built on trade rather than warfare. The site overturned decades of assumptions about when and how civilisation developed in the Western Hemisphere.

The vast Inca road network spanning over 30,000 km and running through six modern South American countries was inscribed as a transnational World Heritage Site in 2014. In Peru, the roads pass through the most dramatic Andean terrain, linking Cusco to the coast and the Amazon through mountain passes above 5,000 m, with stone-paved sections still walkable today.

Built around 250 BCE on the coast of northern Peru, Chankillo is the oldest known solar observatory in the Americas — thirteen stone towers arranged along a hilltop ridge mark the positions of the rising and setting sun across the full solar year. The complex includes a fortified temple and two observation points that allow the solar calendar to be tracked with remarkable precision.