Secret hotspots for your bucket list this winter

Conde Nast Traveller

Southern Peru

With the Machu Picchu-Sacred Valley-Cusco loop well trodden, Peru travel specialist Andean has created a route round the country’s less-explored south, with its pre-Incan cultures and colossal landscapes, near the Bolivian and Chilean borders. The trip tends to start in Quechuan-colonial Arequipa with a stay at Cirqa, a 1540-built monastery that still has the old rough volcanic stone walls but is now a gorgeous 11-room bolthole, and a base for architecture tours with helpings of local queso helado (cheese ice cream).

Then the journey goes high, up to about 16,100 feet above sea level, across the Altiplano, with a pause on the eye-defying Patahuasi plateau to see the gurgling Misti, one of Peru’s highest volcanoes, over a cup of coca-leaf tea. Up here, Andean has added a pit stop in the remote Colca Valley, home to godlike condors and ancient Collagua culture. Puqio is Peru’s first safari-style camp, with eight romantic tented villas among swaying cereals and grassy pathways. There’s a central adobe rotunda, for no-menu homegrown meals, as well as condor-spotting excursions, including from the top of the ancient Chimpa fortress, overlooking a gorge twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.

The route moves on through salt flats, plains, vicuña-rich nature reserves and rock forests on the way to Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake, where guests stay at Titilaka, a waterside property with an outdoor tub. For all the hypnotic appeal of the nesting black ibises, the highlight is an all-day trip to meet, eat and laugh with the Uro-Aymara communities who live on self-fashioned islands of junco reeds – a long way from the madding crowds. andean.travel. Damien Gabet