Arequipa & Colca Canyon Tour

You will be picked up at the airport and taken to your comfortable hotel to relax and acclimatize to the high altitude. In the afternoon you will be taken on a Arequipa tour of the city to view what is considered to be the most attractive city in Peru, where many colonial buildings are made of white ashler stone. Sites on the tour include Plaza de Armas, a beautiful green filled square with flower beds, palm trees, the Santuarios Andinos Museum, and the wondrous Santa Catalina Monastery.

You will start out early to spend as much time as possible in the majestic Peruvian highlands arriving at the Colca Canyon lookout point "Cruz del Condor" in Chivay. Here you will have a panoramic view of the Canyon. During your journey you will not only see amazing panoramas but also typical Andean villages and animals -llamas, alpacas and vicuñas - whose wool the inhabitants use to make the finest of textiles. To fully enjoy the trip we have arranged an overnight stay in a lodge close to the canyon so that you will have every opportunity to photograph condors and grab some local textile bargains. In the afternoon of day 3 you will return to your hotel in Arequipa - the White City.

Transfer to your Arequipa departure point for your onward connection.
You may book any additional tours and services.

• 2 nights in Arequipa, 1 night in Colca Canyon, in hotels based on US standards.
• Guided visits with English speaking tour guides.
• All transfers and entrance fees.
• All breakfasts. 4-star and up hotels offer breakfast buffets.

Read our newsletter article about restaurants in Arequipa.

Despite more than a thousand items from pre-Columbian cultures such as the Huari, Tiahuanuco, Chancay and Inca, including ceramics, textiles, stone, wood and metal objects, the archeology museum’s most interesting attraction is arguably “Mummy Juanita” or the “Ice Maiden”. Discovered in 1995 by anthropologist Johan Reinhard in the summit crater of Mt. Ampato, Juanita is the Inca mummy of a girl who lived more than 500 years ago. The frozen state of the mummy permitted tests to be run on the organs that revealed new insights into Inca health and nutrition during the reign of the Sapa Inca Pachacuti. The discovery was heralded by Time magazine as one of the world’s top ten discoveries.

*Tour available April through December.

This tour takes not only shows you some of the beautiful things to see in Peru, but also allows you to see how many Peruvians get by from day to day. This tour explains many of the intricacies of daily Peruvian life that are not commonly observed by the typical tourist. On this reality tour you will visit a quarry where locals extract volcanic ashler stone in the traditional, artisan way to build their homes. You will also safely visit a shanty town where you will observe firsthand the struggles and realities of daily life of the lower economic classes. In the shanty town you will visit a wawawasi- a public nursery school, and a local public cafeteria, where mothers come together to cook for their families. The next stop on the tour is a local market where you can try local fruits and vegetables. And finally, you will visit a local public elementary school.

NOTE: This tour is NOT FOR PROFIT. All money earned from this tour is used at the end of the year to buy necessary materials for the public cafeterias and the wawawasis. Some of the money is also destined to purchasing gifts for the children at the wawawasis.