Aguas Calientes, Peru · South America

4 ideal things to do in Aguas Calientes

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked April 20, 2025

1. 01

   Walk in from Hidroeléctrica along the railway

   Nine kilometres of track west of Aguas Calientes·The overland route in. Allow three hours and daylight

   There is no road into Aguas Calientes. Trains come up the gorge, and buses get as far as the Hidroeléctrica station, from where you walk the last nine kilometres beside the rails with the Urubamba grinding away below you and the cloud forest closing in overhead. Three hours, effectively flat, with trains passing near enough that you step off the ballast for them. Most visitors take the train both ways and never see the valley from ground level. I did it with a rucksack packed for a city and was overtaken by a woman carrying a gas cylinder.

2. 02

   Take the stone stairway instead of the bus

   From the Puente Ruinas bridge below the town·First light going up. Downhill also counts, and hurts less

   Buses grind up the switchbacks of the Hiram Bingham road; a stone footpath cuts straight across the bends, and it is about an hour and a half of stairs and a serious amount of vertical. I went up it at twenty-nine and down it at forty-one and the second was the better decision. Climbing, you arrive sweating at a site you then have to concentrate on for four hours. Descending, you get the whole gorge to yourself while everybody else queues in the sun for a seat on a minibus.

3. 03

   The thermal baths the town is named after

   Uphill at the end of the main street·Evening, once you are down off the mountain

   Aguas Calientes is not the official name — that is Machupicchu Pueblo — but it stuck because of the hot springs at the top of the street, which were here before the railway camp, before the hotels, before any of it. They are municipal, concrete, crowded and genuinely hot. After a day of Inca staircases at altitude, this is where the evening is supposed to end, and the municipal tiling does not diminish it. Bring a towel. Everybody forgets, including me, on both visits.

4. 04

   Break the train journey at Ollantaytambo

   Ninety minutes down-valley by rail·A night on the way in beats a night on the way out

   Ollantaytambo is the one place you can walk an Inca street grid that is still lived in — four long streets crossed by seven, walled compounds with a courtyard apiece, doorways people still come home through. Above the town the terraces climb to an unfinished Sun Temple built from six monoliths of pink rhyolite dragged from a quarry on the far side of the river, and nobody has satisfactorily explained how. Most people see it through a train window at speed, which is the largest single waste in Peruvian tourism.