The Most Beautiful Places in Cusco Region
12 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Cusco Region are Sacsayhuamán, Machu Picchu and Coricancha. The list covers 12 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Cusco was the capital of the Inca Empire, and the region around it still reads like the empire's heartland. The Urubamba carves the Sacred Valley between snow peaks and cloud forest, and the Incas shaped this steep country with terraces, irrigation channels and stone so precisely fitted that it has outlasted earthquakes and conquest. The Spanish then built churches directly on Inca foundations, so two civilisations are layered in the same walls.
Above the city, Sacsayhuamán raises zigzag ramparts of enormous polygonal blocks joined without mortar, while in the centre Coricancha, the Inca temple of the Sun, carries the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo on its curved stone base. Machu Picchu sits on a ridge high above the Urubamba, and Choquequirao, its remote sister site, is still reached only on foot across a deep canyon.
The Incas also engineered the land itself: Moray sinks concentric circular terraces into natural hollows, the Maras salt pans step thousands of small pools down a hillside fed by a salty spring, and Q'eswachaka is a grass-rope bridge over the Apurímac that local communities weave anew every year. Colour belongs to the mountains: the mineral stripes of Vinicunca and the turquoise water of Humantay Lake beneath its glacier. In Andahuaylillas, the village church of San Pedro hides painted walls and ceilings rich enough to earn it the nickname of the Sistine Chapel of the Americas.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sacsayhuamán | Archaeological site | |
| 2 | Machu Picchu | Archaeological site | |
| 3 | Coricancha | Temple | |
| 4 | Vinicunca (Rainbow Mountain) | Mountain | |
| 5 | Moray | Terraced fields | |
| 6 | Pisac Archeological Park | Archaeological site | |
| 7 | Q'eswachaka Bridge | Bridge | |
| 8 | Maras Salt Pans | Terraced fields | |
| 9 | Choquequirao | Archaeological site | |
| 10 | Iglesia de San Pedro, Andahuaylillas | Church building | |
| 11 | Humantay Lake | Lake | |
| 12 | Parque archeologico national Ollantaytambo | Archaeological site |
01 Sacsayhuamán
Saqsaywaman
Peru · 2.2 km from Cuzco13.508° S 71.982° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Sacsayhuamán is the great Inca stronghold on the hill that rises above the northern edge of Cusco, at about 3,700 m.
Did you know? The three terrace walls are estimated to contain more than 6,000 cubic metres of stone.
02 Machu Picchu
Peru13.163° S 72.546° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 Machu Picchu sits on a narrow saddle between two peaks in the Andes above the Urubamba River, which loops around the site on three sides at the foot of cliffs some 450 metres high.
Did you know? Hiram Bingham shipped thousands of artefacts, from ceramics to silver figurines and human bones, to Yale University, which returned the last of them in 2012.
03 Coricancha
Peru · 0.7 km from Cuzco13.520° S 71.976° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 At Coricancha the Inca and the Spanish worlds are literally built one on top of the other. The lower walls are Inca ashlar — grey andesite and other hard stone cut into blocks that fit so tightly no mortar was needed — and above and around them rise the church and convent of Santo Domingo.
Did you know? Spanish accounts describe a courtyard garden of life-size maize plants, birds and vicuñas made of gold and silver.
04 Vinicunca (Rainbow Mountain)
Vinicunca
Peru13.870° S 71.303° W
Image by jerzykwpodrozy from Pixabay Vinicunca, better known as the Rainbow Mountain or Montaña de Siete Colores, is a ridge in the Andes of southern Peru whose slopes are painted in parallel bands of colour.
Did you know? The 2015 mining petition, filed by a subsidiary of a Canadian company, covered 400 hectares, the entire mountain and lands of the Chillihuani and Pampachiri communities.
05 Moray
Peru · 9.1 km from Urubamba13.329° S 72.196° W
Image by JustinW from Pixabay Moray looks decorative from above — a series of perfect concentric rings sunk into a natural depression in the Andean plateau — but it was built to measure something.
Did you know? Some estimates suggest the stepped rings could mimic as many as twenty distinct microclimates within a single sinkhole.
06 Pisac Archeological Park
Písac
Peru · 19 km from Cuzco13.409° S 71.843° W
PsamatheM · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Inca complex at Pisac spreads for about a kilometre along a high mountain ridge above the Sacred Valley of the Urubamba, at the entrance to the valley from the Cusco side.
Did you know? Inca engineers widened a natural crack in the rock into a 16-metre tunnel so narrow that people must pass through it in single file.
07 Q'eswachaka Bridge
Puente Queshuachaca
Peru · 29.2 km from Sicuani14.381° S 71.484° W
Aga Khan (IT) · CC BY-SA 4.0 Q'eswachaka, often written Queshuachaca, is the last Inca rope bridge still in use: a suspension bridge made entirely of grass, slung across the gorge of the Apurímac River near Huinchiri in the highlands of Canas province, south of Cusco. Its name in Cusco Quechua means simply "straw-rope bridge".
Did you know? Inca rope bridges were built for walkers, llamas and relay runners, because the Inca used no wheeled transport on their roads.
08 Maras Salt Pans
Salineras de Maras
Peru · 4.2 km from Urubamba13.302° S 72.155° W
Image by jdbenthien from Pixabay On a steep slope in the Peruvian Andes, about 3,200 metres above the sea, some 4,500 small pools step down the side of a ravine like a honeycomb poured over the hill. These are the salt pans of Maras.
Did you know? Each pool is filled, left to evaporate and scraped roughly once a month, so successive layers of salt build up through the dry season.
09 Choquequirao
Peru · 27.2 km from Abancay13.395° S 72.872° W
Bryan Dougherty (bryand_nyc) from New York City, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 Choquequirao sits on a spur above the canyon of the Apurímac River, at about 3,050 m, with the river some 1,600 m below. It is one of the most dramatic sites the Incas built, and one of the least visited, because for now the only way in is on foot.
Did you know? The Giant Stairway, 25 metres long and 4.4 metres wide, ends abruptly partway down the hill; its boulders light up fully at the December solstice sunrise.
10 Iglesia de San Pedro, Andahuaylillas
Iglesia de San Pedro (Andahuaylillas)
Peru · 35.9 km from Cuzco13.674° S 71.678° W
Szacsa82 · CC BY-SA 4.0 From the outside, the church of San Pedro Apóstol in Andahuaylillas looks almost plain: a whitewashed adobe building raised on a stone platform above a wide plaza shaded by old pisonay trees, with a square bell tower and an open balcony chapel on its façade.
Did you know? Under Juan Pérez Bocanegra the parish was one of two centres in the archdiocese of Cusco for translating Christian texts into indigenous languages, the other being at Juli.
11 Humantay Lake
Laguna Humantay
Peru13.379° S 72.585° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 At about 4,200 metres, at the foot of the glaciated peak of Humantay in Peru's Cordillera Vilcabamba, a small lake of startling turquoise fills a hollow below the ice.
Did you know? The name Humantay is usually linked to the Quechua huma, "head", though the meaning of the rest of the word is uncertain.
12 Parque archeologico national Ollantaytambo
Ollantaytambo
Peru · 17.1 km from Urubamba13.256° S 72.266° W
EdsonFuentesMera · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ollantaytambo is an Inca town and temple complex in the Sacred Valley, on the old Inca road towards Machu Picchu.
Did you know? Only three years after his defeat here, in 1540, the native population of Ollantaytambo was granted in encomienda to Hernando Pizarro himself.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Cusco Region?
- On our list, Sacsayhuamán ranks first, followed by Machu Picchu and Coricancha.
- How were the walls of Sacsayhuamán built?
- Inca masons shaped large limestone blocks into irregular polygons and fitted them together without mortar, so tightly that a blade cannot slip between many of the joints. The interlocking shapes help the walls resist the region's earthquakes.
- What was Moray used for?
- The purpose of Moray's circular terraces is not recorded, but the most widely held view is that the Incas used them for agricultural experiments, since the temperature differs noticeably between the top and bottom rings.
- Why is the Q'eswachaka bridge rebuilt every year?
- It is woven from grass rope, which weakens over time, so Quechua communities on both banks gather each year to twist new cords and replace it in a ceremony that keeps an Inca technique alive. The tradition is recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Cusco Region?
- In our collection, the places in Cusco Region are most often archaeological sites (6), terraced landscapes (2), mountains (1) and lakes (1).
- How many places are on this list in Cusco Region?
- The list covers 12 places.