The Andes That Tourism Hasn’t Reached Yet
There is a version of the Andes that exists beyond the permit queues and the guidebook circuits — where the trade routes are still walked by shepherds, where the textile patterns still encode cosmological knowledge that no university has fully decoded, where a lagoon at 4,750 meters reflects a glacier that has no name in any language you speak.
The Lares Valley is that version.
This five-day expedition moves through one of the least-visited trekking corridors in the Cusco region — three high passes, remote Quechua communities, glacial lakes of colors that shift with the light, thermal springs fed by the same geological forces that built the Andes, and an archaeological landscape that most visitors to Peru will never find on their own. It ends at Machu Picchu — but by the time you arrive, you will have spent four days inside the living culture that built it, which changes everything about how the stones receive you.
4 best attractions of Cusco
# Machupicchu
# Sacred valley
# Glaciers
# Lares
Lares Trek
What Makes This Trek Different From Every Other Route to Machu Picchu
The Lares Trek is not an alternative to the Inka Trail. It is a completely different kind of journey — one that moves through inhabited Andean landscape rather than protected archaeological corridor, through communities that have maintained their way of life with a continuity that the conquest interrupted but never fully broke.
The therapeutic value here is relational as much as physical. The master weavers of Cuncani and Cancha Cancha carry knowledge in their hands that took generations to accumulate — pattern systems that encode cosmology, natural dye techniques derived from plants and minerals that Andean communities have used for centuries, textile traditions that are not performed for tourists but practiced as daily life. When you sit beside a Quechua woman and card wool or learn to work a spindle, you are not attending a cultural demonstration. You are participating in something that has survived everything modernity has thrown at it.
The passes — Pachacuteq at 4,750 meters, Huillcac’asa at 4,200 meters — are the physical counterpart to this cultural depth. The altitude demands everything your body has, and gives back proportionally: views across an Andean range that has no visible limit, the particular clarity of mind that only thin air and genuine physical effort produce, and the thermal springs of Lares waiting at the end of Day 3 like something the mountains arranged deliberately.
The Lares District — One Valley, Fourteen Ways In
Lares is not a trail. It is an entire Andean district — a vast, largely untouched territory in the highlands of Cusco that contains within it some of the most authentic community life, dramatic mountain passes, and living cultural tradition left anywhere in the Andes.
What most travelers don’t know is that the Lares district has seven distinct access routes — and since every route can be walked in either direction, that becomes fourteen possible ways to enter, exit, or traverse this territory. Combined with each other, extended, or reversed, these routes can become a two-day introduction or a multi-week immersion. No two combinations produce the same experience.
We know all fourteen. We have walked all fourteen.
The route we offer — and the only one we offer — is the one we consider the most complete expression of what Lares has to give: the highest passes, the most significant weaving communities, the glacial lakes at their most dramatic, the thermal springs at the end of the hardest day, and a cultural depth that the shorter or more accessible routes simply cannot match. It is not the easiest way into Lares. It is the most rewarding way through it.
If you are interested in a different combination — a longer stay in the district, an alternative entry point, a route that connects Lares to another part of the Andean experience — we are happy to design it. Every route is possible. This one, however, is where we put our name.
Contact us to explore what Lares can be built into for you specifically.
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