Chinchero Weavers, Moray and Maras Salt Mines Half-Day Tour Cusco

Chinchero and its traditional weavers

Chinchero sits on a high plateau at about 3,760 metres, around an hour from Cusco, with wide views over the snowy Chicón and Pitusiray peaks of the Urubamba range. The town was a royal estate of the Incas and is still one of the main centres of handmade textiles in the Andes, where women in red dress and flat embroidered hats keep their weaving traditions alive.

On this tour you visit one of the traditional weaving families. They show how sheep and alpaca wool is washed with a natural root soap, then dyed with plants, minerals and the tiny cochineal insect that gives deep reds, before it is woven on backstrap looms into patterns full of meaning. Buying is never required, but this is a good place to find genuine textiles. The Chinchero archaeological site is not part of this tour.

Moray, the circular Inca terraces

Moray is one of the most unusual Inca sites in Peru: a series of perfectly circular terraces built into natural hollows in the plateau, the largest about 30 metres deep. Each ring sits at a different height and catches a different amount of sun and wind, so the temperature changes noticeably from the rim to the bottom. Many researchers believe the Incas used it to test and adapt crops for different altitudes.

With your guide you walk around the rim of the main depression for about 45 minutes, learning how the irrigation channels watered every level. The site is at about 3,500 metres, so walk slowly. If you are wondering how to get to Moray from Cusco, this tour is the simplest way, and the Moray ticket is bought in cash at the entrance.

The Maras salt mines (Salineras de Maras)

The Maras salt mines are a spectacular sight: hundreds of small terraced pools that step down a steep valley side like a white and ochre mosaic. A warm, very salty spring rises higher up the mountain and has been channelled into the pools since before the Incas. Local families still own and work the pools, letting the sun evaporate the water and scraping the salt crystals by hand.

You spend about 45 minutes here with the guide, on a viewpoint path above the pools, learning how the water is shared and how pink salt, white salt and medicinal salt are graded. The colours are brightest in the dry season, from May to October. The Maras salt mines ticket is paid in cash on site, and small stalls sell bags of salt and salted chocolate.

Maras village

Between the salt mines and the road back, the tour makes a short stop of about 20 minutes in the village of Maras, a quiet farming town of adobe houses whose colonial doorways still carry carved stone coats of arms of the families who lived here. The village gave its name to the salt mines and to the rolling plateau of wheat and barley fields around it.

At the stop you visit a local workshop where the salt and other products of the area are shown and sold. As at Chinchero, there is no fee and no obligation to buy. From Maras the van drives about an hour and a half back to Cusco across the plateau, with the Urubamba mountains on the horizon, and drops you near the Plaza de Armas.

The Sacred Valley highlands, a half day from Cusco

This route is one of the most popular half-day tours from Cusco because it shows the high plateau above the Sacred Valley rather than the valley floor. The road crosses farmland where potatoes, quinoa and broad beans grow, with small adobe villages and grazing sheep, and the three stops show weaving, farming and salt-making traditions that link the Incas to today.

Starting at 08:20 and finishing around six hours later, the tour leaves your afternoon free in Cusco. It also pairs well with a longer Sacred Valley day, since it covers sites that full-day tours sometimes skip. The best time to visit Moray and Maras is in the morning dry-season light, which is exactly when this tour runs.