The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in Peru
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable archaeological sites in Peru are Sacsayhuamán, Chan Chan and Machu Picchu. The list covers 9 archaeological sites. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Peru packs a rainless desert coast, the high Andes and the edge of the Amazon into one country, and civilisations flourished in each zone long before the Inca. Moche, Chimú and Chachapoyas peoples built in adobe and stone, and the Inca, in barely a century of empire, left terraces, roads and walls of stone cut to fit so tightly that they have withstood centuries of earthquakes. On the coast, the near absence of rain let enormous mud-brick cities survive.
Around Cusco, Sacsayhuamán rises above the city in zigzag walls of colossal blocks. In the Sacred Valley, Pisac and Ollantaytambo combine sweeping agricultural terraces with temples and fortifications, and Moray consists of circular terraces descending into natural hollows. Machu Picchu sits on a ridge above the Urubamba gorge, and Choquequirao, a related Inca site in the mountains above the Apurímac, is reached only on foot.
The north offers a different picture. Kuélap is a massive walled settlement of the Chachapoyas people on a ridge above the Utcubamba valley, filled with the foundations of round stone houses. On the coast near Trujillo, Chan Chan was the adobe capital of the Chimú, its walls decorated with fish and bird reliefs, and Huaca de la Luna is a Moche temple built in successive layers, each with brightly painted friezes.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sacsayhuamán | Archaeological site | |
| 2 | Chan Chan | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 3 | Machu Picchu | Archaeological site | |
| 4 | Kuélap | Fortress | |
| 5 | Moray | Terraced fields | |
| 6 | Huaca de la Luna | Archaeological site | |
| 7 | Pisac Archeological Park | Archaeological site | |
| 8 | Choquequirao | Archaeological site | |
| 9 | 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 The reason so little of the upper complex survives is that, after the siege of Cusco, the Spanish used Sacsayhuamán as a quarry for the colonial city, and much of the smooth masonry in Cusco's churches and mansions came from here. Only the stones too big to move were left. Some rougher upper retaining walls you see today are modern additions for erosion control. The plaza is still in use: Inti Raymi, the Inca festival of the sun, is staged here every 24 June, and the Warachikuy festival on the third Sunday of September.
Did you know? Cieza also saw a huge hewn stone left near the fortress; local people told him it had grown tired and could not be moved any further.
02 Chan Chan
Peru · 6.2 km from Trujillo8.111° S 79.075° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Inca conquered Chimor around 1470. The Spanish founded Trujillo nearby in 1535, and the city, still famed for its riches, was looted. A site museum keeps textiles, metalwork and carved wooden guardian figures found at palace entrances. UNESCO inscribed Chan Chan on the World Heritage List in 1986 and at the same time placed it on the List in Danger, because heavy rains, flooding and wind, especially during El Niño years, erode the unfired mud.
Did you know? The fish carved on the Tschudi palace walls swim north and south, which some read as the cold Humboldt Current and the warm El Niño waters.
03 Machu Picchu
Peru13.163° S 72.546° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 The finest buildings are in the upper sector, built in classic Inca dry masonry: granite blocks cut and fitted so closely that no mortar was needed. The Temple of the Sun is a curved tower rising from a cave-like hollow among boulders; the Temple of the Three Windows stands on the Sacred Plaza; and on a terraced knoll stands the Intihuatana, a carved ritual stone whose name means "place where the sun is tied". Around them run agricultural terraces covering nearly five hectares, stairways, houses and storehouses. Machu Picchu has been a World Heritage Site, both cultural and natural, since 1983.
Did you know? About 104 caves and rock shelters around the site served as burial places, holding the remains of some 174 people.
04 Kuélap
Peru · 21.6 km from Chachapoyas6.418° S 77.923° W
Elemaki · CC BY-SA 2.5 The settlement may have held around three thousand people. It was abandoned around 1570, in the decades after the Spanish conquest, and the forest gradually reclaimed it. In 1843 a judge from Chachapoyas, Juan Crisóstomo Nieto, came upon the ruins by chance, and they have been studied ever since. Today bromeliads and mosses grow from the old walls, trees rise between the round houses, and on clear days the ridge looks out over a sea of mountains and cloud, which makes the scale of what the Chachapoya built here all the more striking.
Did you know? Many of the dead were buried inside the great walls themselves, as well as beneath the floors of the round houses.
05 Moray
Peru · 9.1 km from Urubamba13.329° S 72.196° W
Image by JustinW from Pixabay The engineering underneath the terraces is arguably the more impressive mystery. Moray sits in a natural sinkhole with no obvious drainage, yet it has never been recorded flooding even after heavy rains — water simply disappears, channeled through some combination of natural fissures and built drainage that researchers still haven't fully mapped underground.
Did you know? Soil studies indicate that earth was carried in from different regions to fill the terraces, as if to reproduce distant farmland on each level.
06 Huaca de la Luna
Peru · 3.6 km from Trujillo8.135° S 78.991° W
Burkhard Mücke · CC BY-SA 4.0 The site also revealed a darker side of Moche religion. In a plaza at the foot of a rocky outcrop on the eastern side, archaeologists found the skeletons of numerous adult men, many with fractures and signs of captivity, who had been sacrificed and left exposed. Some of these deaths appear to coincide with episodes of heavy rain linked to El Niño, though whether the rituals were a response to such disasters remains debated. Systematic excavation began in the early 1990s, and a site museum stands near the temples. The modern city of Trujillo, founded by the Spanish in 1534, lies just across the Moche River and is also the gateway to the vast adobe city of Chan Chan.
Did you know? Excavations in 1995–96 led by Steve Bourget uncovered the remains of dozens of sacrificed young men, with estimates ranging from about 40 to more than 70.
07 Pisac Archeological Park
Písac
Peru · 19 km from Cuzco13.409° S 71.843° W
PsamatheM · CC BY-SA 4.0 The site is divided into seven named sectors, from Qanchis Raqay in the north through Qallaq'asa, a residential quarter of houses and storerooms, to the ceremonial centre known as the Intiwatana. There, on a narrow spur with views on both sides, a semicircular enclosure of finely fitted pink granite blocks surrounds a carved ritual rock, the "hitching post of the sun", which is believed to have been used to follow the sun's movements and mark the agricultural year; at the June solstice the sun rises exactly above a neighbouring peak. Temples, one possibly devoted to the moon, and ceremonial baths fed by channels surround it.
Did you know? Studies of the terraces found them roughly 3 °C warmer than bare hillside, letting crops grow as if about 600 metres lower down.
08 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 The isolation is part of its character. The approach involves descending well over a kilometre in height into the canyon, crossing the Apurímac and climbing all the way back up the other side, and those who make the trek often have the ruins almost to themselves – a rare thing among the great sites of the Andes.
Did you know? A zigzag band of white stone on the uppermost terrace is in Chachapoya style, hinting that workers from that distant northern people helped build the site.
09 Parque archeologico national Ollantaytambo
Ollantaytambo
Peru · 17.1 km from Urubamba13.256° S 72.266° W
EdsonFuentesMera · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Temple Hill is often called the fortress because of its formidable terraces, but its main purpose was religious. Its finest part, the temple sector, includes the Enclosure of the Ten Niches and the unfinished Sun Temple with its Wall of the Six Monoliths, a row of giant fitted slabs. The many half-worked blocks scattered around show that construction was still under way when the site was abandoned. During the Spanish conquest the town became the stronghold of Manco Inca, leader of the Inca resistance: in 1537, on the plain below, his forces turned back a Spanish expedition by attacking from the high terraces and flooding the plain.
Did you know? The defenders flooded the battlefield through prepared channels until the water reached the girths of the Spanish horses.
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 remarkable archaeological sites in Peru?
- On our list, Sacsayhuamán ranks first, followed by Chan Chan and Machu Picchu.
- How did the Inca build walls without mortar?
- Inca masons shaped stones by pounding and grinding them until neighbouring blocks fitted closely together. These interlocking walls flex slightly during earthquakes instead of cracking apart.
- When was Machu Picchu built?
- Machu Picchu was built around the middle of the 15th century, probably as an estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti. It was abandoned around the time of the Spanish conquest and became widely known after Hiram Bingham's visit in 1911.
- What is Kuélap?
- Kuélap is a fortified settlement built by the Chachapoyas people on a mountain ridge in northern Peru, surrounded by massive stone walls. Inside are the remains of hundreds of round stone buildings.
- How many archaeological sites are on this list in Peru?
- The list covers 9 archaeological sites.