Full-Day Tour of Moray Salinas de Maras and The Sacred Valley from Cusco

We will pick up you from your hotel in Cusco at 7am and travel for one hour by private van to Chincheros, a small village with beautiful views of the Sacred Valley. In this charming village, you will see adobe homes, narrow cobbled streets, and people in traditional Peruvian dress. Here, the villagers still practice many Incan traditions and crafts. If you wish, you will see a demonstration of how wool is washed and dyed using native plants and minerals.

We will then continue our journey to Moray in order to see the fascinating site used by the Incas for agricultural experiments and cultivating seeds. There, you will learn how they cleverly designed a drainage system at the bottom of the terraces in order to avoid flooding during the rainy season.

After the tour of Moray, you will take a 20 minute bus ride to the salt mines of Maras. At this amazing site, you can see the pans fed by saline spring water that were built on steep terraces along one side of a narrow valley. The water is sent throughout the pans by a network of channels where the water slowly evaporates leaving the salt behind. Salt has been collected from Maras since Pre-Incan times and it is thought that a collective of salt ‘miners’ has maintained the terraces and channels for hundreds of years.

We will continue our scenic journey to the amazing town of Ollantaytambo. Ollantaytambo is a classic Incan city which conserved the traditional Incan urban construction of narrow streets adjacent to flowing streams. As you walk through the stone streets, the gentle sound of flowing water will make make it easy for you to imagine the city as it was in the time of the Incas. In the upper part of the town, there is an impressive ceremonial center that was used for water worship and also a mighty fortress that protected the access point to the lower part of the valley. We will follow the beautiful route to Urubamba, the heart of the Sacred Valley, where we will stop for a buffet lunch.

After lunch, we will take you to the small village of Pisaq, where you can enjoy its lively artisan market and have some free time to interact with the townsfolk and to shop for handicrafts and souvenirs. Finally, you will be taken to explore the Pisaq Ruins before you return to Cusco at about 6:00- 7:00pm.