We pioneered travel to indigenous communities in Peru more than a decade ago, when we began our close relationship with the villagers of Willoq.

Soon after we began taking travellers to Willoq to witness the daily life of its people and their living Inca culture as represented by their beautiful textiles, the company realised that it would have to take an active role in the community in order to preserve its unique way of life. Our aim was to ensure the villagers receive the benefits of tourism whilst protecting them from its perils.

Reciprocity has always been the corner stone of Andean culture, teaching that one should never accept a gift without having something to offer in return.

Today, our company’s reciprocal relationship with the Willoq community covers three fundamental aspects: health, education and cultural re-evaluation.

Peruvian Odyssey undertakes regular campaigns to prevent disease and provide medical attention to those in need, including hospitalisation. We supply the local school with teaching and sporting equipment and for the last five years have paid the salary of a full-time school teacher.

In order to ensure the future survival of local indigenous culture, children are encouraged to play traditional musical instruments and are taken each year to the historic city of Cusco, where they learn more about the great legacy of their ancestors.

In our work with the adult community of Willoq, we have brought back the ancient techniques of hat making to the village by bringing in craftsmen from neighbouring communities.

Our adventure travel staff also run training courses for local men, who for the last twenty years have supplemented their income from farming by working as porters on the famous Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and as a company we are keen proponents of the new Inca Trail guidelines designed to protect local porters from exploitation.

A trip to the village of Willoq, high in the Patacancha valley, is a journey into the past, to a world governed by a concept of time very different to the one which holds sway in this thought-tormented age of ours.

“When you travel with us, you are travelling with the locals”

Today, the descendants of the Incas continue to live on their ancestral lands, watched over still by the sacred mountains of Verónica and Alankoma.

They work the land as they have always done, with the same patience and skill their ancestors employed to shape and then move the huge blocks of stone with which they built their homes and the temples in which they worshipped in the town of Ollantaytambo, far below Willoq in the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

The Patacancha Valley is a fertile stretch of land sown with a multicoloured patchwork of Andean crops and nourished by irrigation channels built centuries ago to bring fresh water from the area’s snowcapped peaks and highland lakes.

More than sixty species of birds have been recorded in this sylvan inter-Andean paradise, along with seven hundred plant species, many of which are used for dying the locally-produced textiles.

The villagers first language is Quechua and they dress in their traditional red ponchos and shawls, which contrast brightly with the mens’ white trousers and their verdant valley home.

According to historians, the people of Willoq are the direct descendants of the last rulers of imperial Cusco, and they remain today one of the Andean communities least affected by Western influence.