Moray

If you have traveled to Peru to visit Machu Picchu I highly recommend you visit the Inca ruins at Moray first.

It’s about an hour away from Cusco, where you will probably spend a few days acclimatizing to the higher elevations before traveling to Machu Picchu for a day. Moray is an ancient agricultural laboratory the Incas used to test how best to grow crops.

The circular stepped growing areas, which are largely intact some 600 years after they were built, create micro-climates for growing crops that would not normally grow in this part of the world. The deeper the step the warmer the temperatures. So in the bottom circle - with the right soil - which the Incas hauled in, coffee could be grown.