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Coverage / Peru

Peru

South America

Where Peru earns a visit: 9 activities across 9 curated destinations.

9 activities · 11 pairings · 16 verified providers

What you can do in Peru

Craft Skills (Bladesmithing, Pottery, Glass)

Cuscoyear-roundAndean weaving is one of the world's great unbroken textile traditions, pre-Columbian techniques still practiced daily in the villages around Cusco, and the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco is the front door to it. Founded in 1996 by weavers from ten communities, the center runs live weaving demonstrations at its Cusco headquarters and connects visitors to the source communities like Chinchero, where backstrap looms, natural dyeing with cochineal and plants, and iconographies particular to each village pass from grandmothers to granddaughters. Unlike a souvenir stop, the center exists to keep the tradition alive and paid fairly, so learning here directly supports the weavers teaching you.

Culinary / Cooking

Limayear-roundNo city in the Americas takes food more seriously than Lima: its restaurants sit at the top of the World's 50 Best rankings, and the cuisine underneath them, ceviche cured in leche de tigre, lomo saltado's Chinese-Peruvian wok fire, causa, anticuchos, pisco, is deep enough to reward actual study. The cooking-class scene matches the ambition, with instructors who have cooked in the city's top kitchens teaching market-to-table sessions in Miraflores: pick your fish at the market, learn why the lime goes in last, and drink the pisco sour you shook yourself. It is the rare food-capital experience where the lesson is affordable, hands-on, and taught at the source of a cuisine the whole world is currently copying.

Mountaineering / Summits

Overlanding / Expedition Driving

CuscoMay Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct The Peruvian altiplano between Cusco and Puno, running at 3,800m elevation along the shore of Lake Titicaca, is one of the world's most dramatic high-altitude driving environments. Cross the border at Desaguadero into Bolivia and the routes extend across the salt flats of Salar de Uyuni and south through the Atacama. From Cusco alone, the circuit toward Puno takes in colonial churches, pre-Inca ruins, and altiplano landscapes that are genuinely unlike anything at lower elevation. The remoteness is real; mechanical preparation and spare parts matter here.

Paragliding

LimaJan Feb Mar Apr Nov DecLima is one of the only major cities on earth where paragliding is a downtown activity: the sea breeze hits the Miraflores clifftops and stands them up into a ridge-soaring machine, so pilots launch from a city park, soar past apartment towers and the malecon crowds, and land back where they started. The dedicated parapuerto in Raimondi Park runs tandem flights every afternoon with certified pilots, no experience needed, making it the easiest world-class flying experience to actually do: no travel day, no weather trek, just a ten-minute walk from your hotel to the sky.

Surfing

ChicamaMar Apr May Jun Jul Aug SepChicama is a pilgrimage wave: the longest left on the planet, peeling for up to 2.2 kilometres along a desert point in rides so long that boats ferry surfers back to the top rather than have them paddle. It is a wave of sections, so every level gets a piece, beginners on the gentler inside, intermediates linking the middle walls, and advanced surfers chasing the full top-to-bottom marathon that cramps legs before it ends. The town exists for the wave: surf lodges face the point, guides run the return boats, and there is blissfully little else to do. For any surfer who measures rides in seconds, Chicama recalibrates the scale to minutes.

Whitewater Kayaking / Rafting

Apurimac RiverMay Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct NovThe Apurimac is the river trip serious rafters come to South America for: three to four days of Class III-V whitewater through a granite canyon twice the depth of the Grand Canyon, camping on white-sand beaches with condors overhead and no road, town, or signal from put-in to take-out. The rapids are technical and consequential enough that operators require fitness and commitment, but the format, expedition rafting with safety kayakers, camp crews, and star-heavy nights, makes it achievable for adventurous first-timers who take the briefings seriously. As the hydrological source of the Amazon, it also carries the best trivia in rafting: every stroke is technically paddling the Amazon.

Wildlife Safaris

TambopataMay Jun Jul Aug Sep OctThe clay licks of Tambopata stage the Amazon's most photogenic ritual: at dawn, hundreds of macaws and parrots of up to fifteen species descend on exposed riverbank clay in a screaming wall of scarlet, blue, and green. The world's largest known lick sits minutes from the Tambopata Research Center, where a macaw study running since 1989 means habituated birds, knowledgeable guides, and blinds positioned for photographers rather than passersby. Around the licks, the reserve delivers giant river otters, caiman, and canopy towers, with lodge-based logistics that make deep-Amazon photography feel almost easy.

Witness / Attend

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Craft Skills
Culinary
Mountaineering
Overlanding
Paragliding
Surfing
Whitewater / Rafting
Wildlife Safaris
Witness / Attend

Upcoming events in Peru