Three major Inca sites are within a ten-minute walk of the plaza, and the rest of the Sacred Valley is within an hour’s drive. These are the places worth your time, with how to reach each one.
Ollantaytambo rewards a slower visit than most people give it. The great terraced site is the obvious draw, but the free climb up Pinkuylluna gives the better photograph, the Inca street grid below is unlike anywhere else in Peru, and the salt pans of Maras and the terraces of Moray are an easy half-day from town.
Inca sites & ruins Pachacuti’s unfinished masterpiece
The great terraced temple hill above the town is one of the finest surviving Inca sites anywhere — seventeen tiers of stonework climbing to a Sun Temple whose fifty-tonne pink monoliths were dragged from a quarry across the valley and never quite set in place.
Inca sites & ruins Free views, Inca storehouses
On the mountain facing the ruins, a steep footpath climbs past Inca granaries built high in the cold, dry air to preserve grain. It costs nothing, takes about an hour, and gives you the single best photograph of Ollantaytambo.
Inca sites & ruins A carved cave shrine few visitors find
Hidden in a cliff above the Pachar bridge, this small huaca holds an altar cut from the living rock and a false doorway of extraordinary precision. It has no ticket office, no crowd and no signage — just a steep path and one of the strangest pieces of Inca stonework in the valley.
Town & culture The last living Inca town
North of the plaza lies Qosqo Ayllu — a grid of walled Inca compounds, doorways and stone water channels laid out in the 15th century and lived in ever since. Nowhere else in Peru can you walk an Inca street that never stopped being a street.
Sacred Valley day trips Three thousand salt pans on a cliff
A warm, hyper-saline spring has poured out of this mountainside since long before the Inca. Local families still channel it into a honeycomb of shallow terraces and harvest the crystals by hand, exactly as their great-grandparents did.
Sacred Valley day trips The Inca agricultural laboratory
Three enormous concentric bowls sunk into the high plateau, each ring a few degrees warmer than the one above it. The temperature spread across the largest bowl reaches 15 °C, and the best explanation is that the Inca used it to trial crops at different altitudes.
Sacred Valley day trips Weaving villages above the treeline
The road behind Ollantaytambo climbs into a side valley of high pasture, alpaca herds and Quechua villages where women still weave on backstrap looms with plant-dyed wool. Pumamarca’s hillside ruins sit halfway up.
Sacred Valley day trips Half-day and full-day tours from Ollantaytambo and Cusco cover these sites with transport, tickets and a guide included.
