Classic Cusco & Machu Picchu

Upon your arrival in Lima, Peru’s radiant capital, you’ll be welcomed at the airport and transferred to your hotel. Built on desert cliffs above the Pacific, Lima has quietly become one of the world’s great food capitals — where ancient Andean ingredients, Japanese precision, and Afro-Peruvian soul meet on a single plate.

As evening falls, we’ll gather for an orientation to meet your fellow travelers and review the days ahead — a journey through temples, terraces, and sacred landscapes that still carry the memory of the Inca.

A short flight lifts you from sea level to 3,400 meters. We take the rest of the day slowly on purpose — the historic center is yours to wander at an easy pace, coca tea in hand, while your body adjusts to the altitude.

Dinner is left open tonight, so you can rest or explore the streets around the Plaza de Armas as the city settles into evening.

Once the capital of the Inca Empire, Cusco carries its history out loud. We start at Qorikancha, the Inca’s most sacred temple, where colonial arches meet seamless Inca stonework in a single wall — the whole history of Peru compressed into one view.

From there, the ridge above the city: Sacsayhuamán, where megalithic blocks weighing hundreds of tons fit together so tightly no one has fully explained how. We close the day on the Plaza de Armas itself, Cusco’s living room since Inca times.

The Sacred Valley isn’t a backdrop — it’s a living landscape. Along the Urubamba, Inca terraces still grow food and markets still trade in color. We visit Pisac, where a hilltop citadel looks down over one of the Andes’ great traditional markets, then Ollantaytambo, a working Inca town still laid out on its original grid.

Along the way, Moray’s concentric agricultural terraces and the Maras salt pans — still worked by local families — show just how precisely the Inca read this land.

No photograph readies you for the moment the citadel appears out of the cloud forest. We build this day around that silence — time with your guide among the agricultural terraces, the Temple of the Sun’s seamless curved stonework, and the Temple of the Three Windows, where Inca legend held the world began.

We move at a pace that lets the place speak for itself, then return to Cusco by train through the Urubamba gorge as evening falls.

A final Andean breakfast before we transfer you to the airport for your onward flight — with enough time built in to linger over coffee, not watch the clock.

Your Retablo app stays with you after you land: the music, the stories, and the people you met along the way, kept as a record of the journey rather than a ticket you put away.