Field report · Colca Valley, Peru
Condors over the Colca
Four hours by road from Arequipa, a canyon over ten thousand feet deep, and a lookout where the birds come up to meet you.
Colca Valley, Peru
The Colca is one of the deepest canyons in the world, over ten thousand feet, about a hundred miles northwest of Arequipa in the Peruvian Andes. You reach it by road, and the road is a good part of the reason to go.
We drove from Arequipa to Chivay, which took about four hours through the Andes and the Colca Valley. It runs past villages and farms with people working them, and the landscape does not let up at any point. It is not a transfer you want to sleep through.
We stayed at Las Casitas, a Belmond property just outside Yanque, sitting at over eight thousand feet with the canyon walls around it. The lodge is set in gardens full of things that only grow at that altitude, and the air at that height is clean in a way you notice with your whole chest. You can see a long way in every direction.
Yanque itself is a short trip and worth one, with shops, small restaurants and market stalls selling produce, spices and crafts.
“Wingspans reaching ten feet, coming up out of the canyon rather than down into it.”
From the journalThe condors
The Mirador del Condor is a lookout set high above the canyon and it is the reason most people come. Andean condors are the largest flying birds in the world, with wingspans up to ten feet, and at the mirador they ride the thermals up past you rather than being distant specks below.
It is a genuine wildlife spectacle rather than a managed one, which means it is also weather dependent. Give yourself the flexibility to go on more than one morning if the first is poor.
Everything else in the valley
There is hiking along the canyon trails with the mountains on one side and the drop on the other. Beyond that the valley holds Cabanaconde, and the Andean villages of Maca and Madrigal, all of which reward an unhurried day.
The pattern that worked was simple: mornings out, afternoons back at the lodge doing very little. At that altitude that is not laziness, it is sensible acclimatisation.
We would still refuse to do the Colca as a day trip. The canyon is not the attraction. The valley is.
From the journal · The Travelling T · Written January 2020
