Put on Your Adventure Cap at Peru’s First Safari-Style Luxury Hotel

Staying in a canvas tent might feel like being an adventurer exploring uncharted lands, but rest assured, staying at Peru’s first glamping hotel is far from roughing it. Opened within the last year, Puqio, which means “spring” in Quechua, is perched on slopes overlooking Colca Canyon, the world’s fifth-largest gorge, which plummets twice as deep as Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Getting here is an experience in itself as the complementary shuttle from the Arequipa airport passes through a countryside filled with prancing llamas, alpacas, and vicuñas. Or add a trip through the countryside as a stop in an adventure that includes one of the world’s great train journeys, the Belmond Andean Explorer, which climbs over the Andes from Cusco. The custom luxury tour operator Extraordinary Journeys can make this connection seamless.

Puqio, from the successful Peruvian boutique hotel brand Andean, has eight standalone rooms, split between 53-square-metre Pirca lodges and Carpas (tents). Puqio’s roomy safari-style canvas tents each house a wood-burning fireplace, comfy individual beds, and vintage lounge seating alongside a desk that invites you to pull out your leather-bound journal and quill to scribble about the day’s adventures. The bathrooms include both indoor and outdoor rainshowers as well as a separate room with a bathtub. When you’re feeling good and relaxed, meet the cute artisanal doll delivered during turndown service and lounging on the plush duvet. Then dive under the covers heated by a hot water bottle.

After a good night’s sleep, stretch on the outdoor terrace, which has stunning views over the hotel’s swinging red quinoa and corn crops across the canyon to surrounding mountains that rise to nearly 5,000 metres. From the entrance, look out for Sabancaya Volcano, which spews a cloud of ash into the air every hour.

One of the best parts of a stay at Puqio is the cuisine. Each meal is prepared using local ingredients centred on a theme: a five-course quinoa feast might include quinoa bread, chowder, and risotto, along with lamb shank confit and French vegetable tian. Expect to taste different potatoes as well, since there are 4,000 varieties in Peru, 42 of which are grown at Puqio. Meals are paired with South American wine or cocktails and served in a lodge that belongs in a design magazine, with animal hides draped over comfy chairs and a skylight that invites sunbeams into the room morning and afternoon. You may also make your own drinks at the bar: bloody mary in the morning, anyone?

As part of the package, daily guided tours include seeing the world’s largest flying bird, the Andean condor, which has an impressive three-metre wingspan. Condors love Colca Canyon, so you’ll likely spot more than a handful, especially during the peak season from April to November. Other adventures include visiting traditional villages filled with colourfully dressed locals and gilded churches, shopping for clothing made from vicuña (the world’s softest and most valuable wool), and wandering around the expansive 700-year-old Uyo Uyo ruins, likely without another visitor in sight.

Whatever you do, you’ll have the comfort of a sumptuous stay at Puqio to return to—something even a weather-hardened adventurer can love.

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