Full day Horse Back Riding in the Sacred Valley - Criollos Horses

You will be picked up from your hotel and transferred to Pachar’s bridge where the horses wait. We'll cross the Urubamba river for the climb (almost 1000 meters) to the altiplano of the Andes. This climb takes about two hours. Take it easy because the change of altitude does not only affect the horses. Once we are at 3700M you will be impressed by the sight of the snow-capped mountains of Chicon, Veronica and Salcantay and the beautiful altiplano of the Andes that surrounds us. After a box lunch in Maras, a typical Andean village that boasts a beautiful 400-year colonial old church, we continue our ride to Moray. This site is not the ruin of a city or a fortress, it is an earthwork.

The ancient people of the region took four enormous natural depressions in the landscape and sculpted them into several levels of agricultural terraces that served, hundreds of years ago, as an experimental agricultural station for the development of different strain of crops. This was possible due to the discovery of a fascinating phenomenon: the climates of many different ecological zones were present at a single site. In the thirty or so meters of altitude between the bottom and top levels of Moray's main depression, one scientist, John Earls, has recorded a full 15 degrees Celsius difference in temperature. That is equal to the difference between the mean annual temperatures of London and Bombay. Conceivably it was Moray itself that played the key role in the original transformation of maize into a high-altitude crop.

There are no great ruins in Moray to impress visitors. Moray is more for the contemplative traveler with an affinity for such phenomena as the Nazca Lines, the stone rings of Avebury and the menhirs of Brittany and then  we will visit  the salt mines  of Maras, a fascinating system of platforms used since the Inca times to extract salt from a natural mountain spring. Visually the shining salt-encrusted terraces are extraordinary. Return to Cuzco.

• Transportation round trip
• Expert Guide and Muleteer
• One horse per client
• Lunch in the Sacred Valley