Why Choose Peru’s Historic Inca Trail

Choquequirqo. Lares. Salkantay. Peru offers a multitude of trekking trails to choose from, each with breathtaking scenery and unique challenges, but Peru’s historic Inca Trail is perhaps the most famous of them all—carrying a mystique unlike any other.

The Inca Trail is located in the Andes mountains the 26 miles hiking trail passes through several different environments including beautiful mountain scenery, cloud-forest, subtropical jungle, alpine tundra, and, of course, a stunning mix of Inca paving stones, ruins and tunnels. The final destination of the trail ends in the mysterious “Lost City of the Incas” Machu Picchu.

The Inca Trail is a world-famous historic marvel and one of the most exciting ways to reach the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. And yet the trail many tourists know today as the “Inca Trail” is actually just a small section of 43 km (26 m) of the extensive system of trails that held the great Inca empire together. The actual Inca Trail was 23,000 km (14,291 m) of trail that integrated the Tahuantinsuyo Empire that covered parts of Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, to the center of Chile and the north of Argentina.

These trails were mainly on the coast or in the mountains but in a few cases, they reached the tropical edge of the jungle. The roads varied in quality and size, so much so that trails in the plains and coasts could be six to eight meters wide, while trails in the mountains were paved with large stone blocks averaging meter wide and were much more daring and aggressiveness.

Believed to be a route of pilgrimage to Machu Picchu, some paths were simple trails through easier terrain that would have been more ideal for transporting products, llamas, and people to Machu Picchu. While others were built through difficult terrain, with stone or wood bridge crossings, and tunnels that were carved through the mountains. Because the Incas believed the mountains were holy it is thought likely the more strenuous trails of pilgrimage were only used for religious ceremonies and rituals to honor their sacred peaks such as the Salkantay mountain, the highest peak in the Vilcabamba mountain range.

Rediscovered by Hiram Bingham in 1915 during an expedition to Machu Picchu, it wasn’t until after a significant amount of clearing was done than Bingham realized that what he had come across was the ruins of an old Inca road that led out of the Sacred Valley in the direction of Machu Picchu.

The mountains around Cusco and the Sacred Valley are riddled with ancient trails that were once used by the Incas and their predecessors, dotted along these mystic trails are countless archaeological sites that once held religious, ceremonial or agricultural significance. Today tens of thousands of tourists come from all over the world for the sole purpose of trekking and experiencing the same trail that the Incas walked more than five hundred years.

The Inca Trail is accessible in different places and can be hiked the “Classic” way in four days, or you can join the trail very close to Machu Picchu to hike up to the Sacred City in one day.

Quick Facts of Peru’s Historic Inca Trail