Cusco
The magnificent city we see today is the result of the superimposition of one culture upon another. Nestled in the heart of the Andes, Cusco was the political and religious capital of the Incas, the hub of the greatest empire ever seen in the Americas and a place of pilgrimage for all those who worshipped the sun god, Inti.

With the arrival of the Spanish in 1532, Cusco’s temples and palaces became the foundations for magnificent neo-Baroque churches such as Santo Domingo and the Cathedral, and above its narrow streets rose the wooden balconies of red-roofed, whitewashed colonial houses.

Machu Picchu
Beyond the Sacred Valley of the Incas, where the Urubamba river leaves the highlands to rush down into the cloud forest, the ancient citadel of Machu Picchu lies amid a verdant tropical landscape scattered with orchids and bromeliads and crisscrossed by a network of Inca highways, where it lay hidden from the world for four centuries until it was discovered by science in 1911. Reached by hikers along the world-famous Inca Trail or via a spectacular railway journey, Machu Picchu has lost none of its mystery in the ninety years since its discovery.