Sacred Valley (Ollantaytambo & Pisac)

The Sacred Valley of the Incas (Valle Sagrado) is the Urubamba River valley northwest of Cusco — a fertile corridor between the highlands and the jungle that was the agricultural heartland of the Inca Empire and now contains the most accessible concentration of Inca ruins outside Machu Picchu. Ollantaytambo (a massive temple-fortress with a still-inhabited Inca town at its base) and Pisac (terraced ruins above a bustling market town) are the valley's two anchor sites.

Ollantaytambo is the best-preserved Inca town in Peru — the grid of stone streets, canals, and residential compounds at the base of the fortress is still occupied and still uses the original Inca layout, making it the only place in Peru where you can walk through a functioning town that is essentially unchanged from the 15th century. The fortress above, with its massive terraces and the unfinished Temple of the Sun (whose six monolithic pink granite slabs, transported from a quarry across the valley, represent the Inca building tradition at its most ambitious), provides the valley's most dramatic archaeological experience.

Pisac's terraced hillside ruins are less monumental but equally impressive — the agricultural terraces, the sun temple, and the cliff-side cemetery (where thousands of Inca burial niches are carved into the rock face) cover a mountainside that demonstrates how the Inca adapted their engineering to terrain. The Pisac market in the town below (daily, largest on Sundays and Tuesdays) is the best place in the valley to buy textiles and crafts directly from Quechua communities.