Aguas Calientes is a town that exists entirely because of what is four kilometres up the road, and the infrastructure reflects this: souvenir shops, tourist restaurants, backpacker hostels, and mid-range hotels lining the main street and the Urubamba River gorge. Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel is the exception. The property occupies five hectares of cloud forest above the town, with the hotel’s eighty-three casitas dispersed through the vegetation on stone-paved paths that follow the natural topography, and the sound of the Urubamba always present somewhere below.
The cloud forest that Inkaterra manages is working biological habitat. The property contains more than 370 species of orchid — the most extensive private orchid collection in Peru — maintained by a resident botanical team. The Andean spectacled bear, South America’s only bear species and one that most travellers never see in the wild, is present in the surrounding forest and observed by the property’s conservation programme. Naturalist guides lead cloud forest walks along trails that cross streams and pass through vegetation corridors where hummingbirds feed at close range on flowering bromeliads. This is not a garden; it is intact montane cloud forest at 2,040 metres, and the guides are trained to read it with scientific precision.
The casitas are whitewashed Adobe-style structures with fireplaces and garden terraces, warm and solid in a setting where the temperature drops and the mist rolls in by mid-afternoon. The two heated pools are set into the forest, surrounded by vegetation, and used as much for warming up after an early morning citadel visit as for conventional resort swimming. Dining at the main restaurant draws on the Andean biodiversity that surrounds the property: native potato varieties, quinoa grown at altitude, Amazonian ingredients from the lower slopes to the east.
Inkaterra’s pre-dawn Machu Picchu programme is the most practically useful thing the property offers. Entry to the citadel is now timed and ticketed, and arriving at opening before the tour groups disembark from the first buses changes the quality of the visit fundamentally. The agricultural terraces in the early morning light, the mountains above the citadel clear of afternoon cloud, the llamas moving between the ruins without the crowd pressure of the midday visit — this is why the extra cost of the Inkaterra operation relative to a town-centre hotel is justified for anyone making the journey specifically for Machu Picchu.
