Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel

The Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo sits on the banks of the Vilcanota river in Aguas Calientes, on twelve hectares of cloud forest the property has cultivated for forty years. The garden contains the most extensive private orchid collection in the Peruvian Andes — over three hundred registered native species, many of them visible only from the trails that thread the property. The hotel was built before the village around it grew up, and it remains buffered from the town by its own forest.

What the property offers, beyond a Cloud Forest View room over the river, is a resident naturalist programme that operates from the gardens themselves: dawn bird walks, night excursions to spot the Andean spectacled bear cubs released into the surrounding forest, sessions on orchid taxonomy with the staff botanist. For travellers whose interest in Machu Picchu extends to the surrounding ecology — the cloud forest as living context for the archaeological site — Inkaterra is the only property in Aguas Calientes that delivers that frame from the moment of check-in.