Perú Fabulosa

DAY 1 | FRI 15 MAY | ARRIVE LIMA | 3 NIGHTS

We arrive in Lima and transfer as a group to nhow Lima in the Miraflores neighbourhood. The hotel sets the tone immediately — Inca-inspired design motifs, bold colours and a theatricality that somehow never tips into kitsch. Check in, decompress, and let the journey begin to take shape around you.

This evening we meet on the 13th floor for a welcome cocktail with Jemma before sitting down to our first dinner together in-house. For those arriving on long overnight flights, the evening is flexible — a cocktail and an early night is entirely acceptable.

Accommodation: nhow Lima Hotel – 3 Nights

DAY 2 | SAT 16 MAY | LIMA

Lima has two faces, and today we meet both. After a relaxed breakfast, our local guide joins us for a full-day exploration. We begin in the Historic Centre — one of the great colonial cities of the Americas, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site — visiting the main square and monuments, stepping inside the Convent of Santo Domingo, and calling at Casa Aliaga, a colonial mansion that has been lived in by the same family across 16 generations and nearly five centuries.

The Larco Archaeological Museum is one of the finest pre-Columbian collections anywhere in the world: 45,000 pieces of gold, silver, textiles and ceramics housed in an 18th-century building, with the Mochica ceramics from the north coast of Peru as the real highlight. Lunch is at the museum’s own Café del Museo restaurant, on your own account.

Returning through Miraflores, we pass Huaca Pucllana — an adobe pyramid sitting incongruously among apartment buildings, a reminder that this land has been inhabited and revered for thousands of years. The afternoon is free: the seafront walk, the AMANO Pre-Columbian Textile Museum, or simply the pool.

Tonight we dine at a restaurant led by one of Peru’s most celebrated female chefs — a woman who first made her name at one of Lima’s most acclaimed kitchens before striking out independently. Her cooking draws deeply from Peru’s diverse ingredients and transforms them into dishes that are as thoughtful as they are delicious.

DAY 3 | SUN 17 MAY | LIMA

Our third Lima day takes us south into Barranco, the city’s bohemian heartland. Originally a summer retreat for wealthy Limeños during the colonial period, it is now a neighbourhood of galleries, workshops, painted walls and great restaurants. We walk streets that hold both colonial and republican architecture, visit the studios of artists Jade Rivera and Víctor Delfín, and feel the creative pulse that has made Lima an arts city as much as a food one.

Lunch is at Isolina, an art-filled restaurant inside a 1912 Belle Époque mansion — one of the classic Limeño tables. But first, we spend the morning at the Surquillo market, because there is no better place to understand a city’s food culture than where its cooks shop. Tropical fruits, Andean tubers, aji peppers, choclo, quinoa — the raw ingredients of a cuisine that has been changing how the world eats.

Before returning to the hotel, we visit El Cacaotal — an edible library of Peruvian craft chocolate sourced directly from small-scale farmers across the country. A tasting here explores the extraordinary range of flavour held within Peruvian cacao and coffee, region by region.

DAY 4 | MON 18 MAY | LIMA – CUSCO | 3 NIGHTS

This morning we fly from Lima to Cusco, and from the airport we head straight down into the Sacred Valley — sitting some 500 metres lower than the city, which allows the body to ease into altitude gently. The valley road is one of the more beautiful drives in South America: terraced hillsides, eucalyptus groves, Andean peaks pressing in on all sides.

We stop for a very special lunch at Hacienda Sarapampa, a family property that has been growing Cusco Giant White corn for three generations. This is a ‘Be My Guest’ experience — an intimate, slow meal in which each dish follows the rhythm of the corn-farming cycle: fallow, sowing, hilling, harvest. The hospitality is warm, the anecdotes are wonderful, and the food is unlike anything you will find in a restaurant.

After lunch we continue to Pisac market — one of the best craft markets in Peru, known for its textiles, silver jewellery and handwoven pieces — before arriving at our hotel on the banks of the Vilcanota River. The Aranwa Sacred Valley Hotel is set within a majestic 17th-century colonial hacienda, spread over gardens laced with canals and lily ponds. The spa is, by any measure, exceptional.
Accommodation: Aranwa Sacred Valley Hotel & Wellness – 3 Nights

DAY 5 | TUE 19 MAY | MARAS, MORAY & CHINCHERO

The day begins gently — an optional guided yoga or mindful meditation session before breakfast, should you want it. Then we set off for three jewels of the Sacred Valley that reveal the Incas as architects, farmers and landscape engineers of the highest order.

At Maras, more than 3,000 small salt pools — pocitos — have been cut into the mountainside. The salt harvest here has not changed in thousands of years: brine seeps from a natural spring, fills the pools, and evaporates in the thin Andean air. Watching locals work the terraces, the salt they gather is considered among the finest in the world.

Moray is something altogether different: a series of concentric circular terraces descending into a natural hollow. The Incas appear to have used the differing microclimates created by the varying depths to experiment with crops, testing altitude tolerance and adapting seeds. It is unlike anything else you will see in the valley.

Lunch is at a traditional huarique — a Peruvian family-run tavern, operating on a strictly pre-arranged basis with no signage, no online presence, and an entirely farm-to-table menu sourced from the property’s own garden. The setting, surrounded by mountains and green fields, is as memorable as the food.

We finish the afternoon at the Chinchero Plateau, visiting the archaeological complex that during the Inca Empire served as an agricultural and livestock centre, and the exterior of the 1607 Nuestra Señora de Monserrat church, built directly atop an old Inca palace.

DAY 6 | WED 20 MAY | SACRED VALLEY – HUAYLLAFARA & LAMAY

Today we leave the main valley road and walk into the life of the community of Huayllafara. We drive to the village and spend a morning with families engaged in farming, animal care and traditional crafts — learning the Andean agricultural cycle firsthand, visiting fields of potatoes, tarwi, quinoa and beans, and hearing how these crops have sustained communities at altitude for centuries.

After time on the land, our hosts share their traditional recipes and we join in preparing a farm-to-table lunch together. It is the kind of experience that stays with you: not as a performance put on for visitors, but as an invitation into daily life.

The return walk to Lamay follows an easy trail along the Carmen River, winding through native forest with good birdwatching. The afternoon is free at the hotel — an excellent time to book into the UNNO Spa, the first and most comprehensive wellness centre of its kind in Peru, blending Andean ancestral knowledge with modern therapeutic technique.

DAY 7 | THU 21 MAY | URUBAMBA – OLLANTAYTAMBO | 3 NIGHTS

We check out of the Aranwa and move up the valley to Ollantaytambo, stopping first in the town of Urubamba. We wander the Plaza de Armas, visit the Church of Santiago Apóstol and La Casa de Martin, and stop by Cerámicas Seminario, where one of Peru’s best-known ceramic artists works in the tradition of pre-Columbian design. If the artists are in, the visit becomes something rather special.

Lunch is at a garden restaurant that honours fire, time and origin — a place where each dish is born from deep respect for the land and the producers of the Sacred Valley. Long lunches are a feature of this journey, and this one deserves the time.

After lunch we check in at El Albergue, the family-owned boutique hotel that sits within the Ollantaytambo train station — putting Machu Picchu almost literally at our doorstep. Elegantly rustic, with an organic farm, gardens bursting with colour and fruit, and a pachamanca tradition that runs through everything it does, El Albergue is one of those rare properties that feels like a discovery every time.

Accommodation: El Albergue – 3 Nights

DAY 8 | FRI 22 MAY | OLLANTAYTAMBO

After breakfast, we join the Destilería Andina team — connected to El Albergue — for a morning of hands-on distilling. Using premium Peruvian cane spirit, freshly harvested herbs from the hotel garden and select Andean botanicals, we craft our own Elixir Andino under the guidance of master distillers. We explore the traditional cañazo process, sample blends, and leave with a personalised herbal macerado to take home.

We sit down to a traditional Pachamanca lunch: meats and vegetables slow-cooked over hot stones in an earth oven, one of the Andean world’s oldest culinary traditions, eaten here with mountains and ruins on the horizon.
The afternoon is free — time to rest or to explore Ollantaytambo itself, one of the few continuously inhabited Inca villages remaining in Peru, where narrow cobbled streets and family courtyards have barely changed in five centuries.

This evening, founder Johana or Antonio leads us through the Alqa Andean Art Museum, a collection built in close collaboration with local communities that showcases the richness and symbolism of Andean folk art across generations. We end our Sacred Valley immersion at the museum’s Gastronomic Laboratory — a research kitchen dedicated to studying, preserving and celebrating the diversity of Andean ingredients.

DAY 9 | SAT 23 MAY | MACHU PICCHU

With the Ollantaytambo train station at our doorstep, we board the Vistadome Observatory early in the morning. Panoramic windows, an open-air observatory car and a bar car with live music make the hour-and-a-half journey an experience in itself — mountains pressing close, the Urubamba River running fast below, Andean communities visible in the folds of the valley.

At Aguas Calientes we board the bus to Machu Picchu for our private guided visit. Built in the 15th and 16th centuries, the city was never found by the Spanish and was not widely known to the outside world until Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention in 1911. Self-sufficient and sacred, it terraced its own food, channelled its own water, and built its extraordinary stone structures without mortar — an architectural achievement that has held through centuries of Andean weather and seismic activity.

The private guided tour covers the citadel in depth: the Temple of the Sun, the residential quarters, the agricultural terraces, the Sun Gate viewpoint. After the tour, free time to wander at your own pace. We descend to Aguas Calientes for lunch before boarding the return train to Ollantaytambo.

Back at El Albergue, the evening is yours — rest, or gather for a glass of wine and the natural conversation that follows a day at one of the world’s great wonders.

DAY 10 | SUN 24 MAY | OLLANTAYTAMBO – CUSCO | 3 NIGHTS

A well-earned sleep-in this morning. Ollantaytambo rewards a slow wander: the town divides into two ancient ayllu (clan districts), Qosqo Ayllu and PatakanchaAraqama Ayllu, both fabulous to explore on foot. You might visit Awamaki, a nonprofit social enterprise that connects Andean women artisans with global markets. Or seek out the statue of Cura Ocllo — last Inca queen and the Forgotten Heroine of the Empire. The ruins of Pinkuylluna and the old Incan fortress at Pumamarca are within easy walking distance.

After lunch at a local restaurant, our private van transfers us to Cusco. En route, we stop at Textil Sulca, a specialised museum and workshop dedicated to recreating pre-Columbian weaving techniques from Wari and Inca cultures — seven exhibition rooms, live demonstrations, and hand-woven, naturally dyed pieces crafted over months. It is a remarkably vivid bridge to a world of skill and symbolism that long predates the Inca Empire.

We check in at Antigua Casona San Blas in Cusco’s bohemian San Blas neighbourhood. Built between 1750 and 1800, with thick adobe walls, hand-carved balconies and red-tiled roofs, it is a piece of living history. Tonight, light Peruvian tapas in-house at Piedra & Sal.

Accommodation: Antigua Casona San Blas – 3 Nights

DAY 11 | MON 25 MAY | CUSCO

Although Machu Picchu has become the symbol of the Inca Empire, the true jewel was always Cusco — the ancient capital where the Incas ruled as God-kings and where the buildings still bear the unmistakable fingerprint of that civilisation beneath their Spanish facades.

Our guide meets us at the hotel for a leisurely introduction to the city: the San Pedro Market, where the rhythm of daily Cusqueño life plays out in full; the 16th-century Cathedral, with its extraordinary colonial art; and the Santo Domingo Convent, built directly over Qoricancha — the Sacred Temple of the Sun, whose inner walls were once entirely lined with gold. We also visit the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús, one of the most architecturally impressive achievements of the Spanish colonial period.

A long lunch at a traditional Cusqueño restaurant. The afternoon is free for independent exploration — the Museo Inka, Qorikancha, the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco, or the Pisco Museum, where the story of Peru’s national spirit is told with appropriate enthusiasm.

DAY 12 | TUE 26 MAY | CUSCO

This morning we visit Sacsayhuaman, the massive Inca archaeological site above Cusco that the Spanish interpreted as a fortress but the Incas designed as the head of a puma — the city below forming the body. The engineering here is staggering: stone blocks weighing hundreds of tonnes, fitted together with such precision that a sheet of paper cannot pass between them. The views back across Cusco from the site are worth the walk alone.

The afternoon is free — a last chance to wander the city at your own pace, revisit a neighbourhood, or do what Cusco does best: browse the markets and boutiques for textiles, silver and ceramics to bring home. We have a long list of recommendations.

This evening we gather for our farewell experience. The Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, housed in the historic Casa Cabrera, holds around 400 pieces spanning 3,000 years of Andean civilisation. With a private guide, we move through rooms organised by material, region and period — a fitting way to sit with everything this journey has shown us. Dinner follows at MAP Café, where contemporary Peruvian cuisine meets an intimate, candlelit atmosphere. It is a perfect ending.

DAY 13 | WED 27 MAY | CUSCO

A final lazy breakfast at the Casona. Then it is time to pack your bags, gather your memories, and prepare for whatever comes next. One group transfer is provided to Cusco airport for onward flights.

Note: the domestic flight back to Lima is not included, as many guests will wish to continue directly to one of the optional extensions. If you are returning to Lima, please arrange your own Cusco–Lima flight.

Gracias por acompañarnos en Perú. Thank you for joining us.

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