🇵🇪 Peru · The Highlands and the Andes
Laguna Churup is one of the classic acclimatization hikes out of Huaraz: a turquoise lake boxed in at the foot of Nevado Churup, at about 4,450 meters, inside Parque Nacional Huascarán. Being close to the city and relatively short, though demanding because of the altitude and a rocky stretch or two, makes it the ideal way to test your body before taking on bigger treks like Laguna 69 or the Santa Cruz circuit.
The trail starts in the village of Pitec, on the outskirts of Huaraz, and climbs the Quillcayhuanca valley through puna grassland, rock and high-altitude vegetation. The last part includes a steep stretch where you have to use your hands and fixed ropes to get over a few rock walls, which adds a touch of adventure. The reward is a deep turquoise lake beneath the snowy walls of Churup.
This guide covers how to reach the trailhead from Huaraz, how hard and how long the hike is, what to watch out for at altitude and why Churup is one of the best day trips for acclimatizing and taking in the Cordillera Blanca without going far from the city.
Laguna Churup is a glacial lake formed by meltwater from the peak of the same name, inside Parque Nacional Huascarán, created in 1975 and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. For centuries the peak and the lake have been part of the sacred landscape of the peoples of the Callejón de Huaylas, who venerated the apus, the guardian mountains of the Cordillera Blanca.
Read the full history ↓The region of the snow-capped summits: between the Cordillera Blanca —the highest in the tropics— and the Callejón de Huaylas, home to Huascarán, to the temple of Chavín, to the avalanche that buried Yungay and to turquoise lakes.
Read the history of Áncash →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Picture a rock basin at 4,450 meters, carved out by ice over tens of thousands of years, that one day filled up with turquoise water: that, in a nutshell, is Laguna Churup. It's a lake of glacial origin, one of the many scattered through the quebradas (ravine valleys) of the Cordillera Blanca, the highest tropical mountain range in the world. It was formed by the glaciers that dug out the valley at the foot of Nevado Churup; as the ice pulled back, the meltwater stayed trapped in that rocky basin, giving rise to the lake you see today beneath the walls and hanging glaciers of the mountain.
The turquoise of its water comes, as in other lakes of the range, from glacial flour: ultra-fine particles of rock ground down by the ice that stay in suspension and tint the water in milky shades between green and blue. The lake is fed by meltwater off the peak, so its level and its look change with the seasons and, over the long run, with the retreat of the glaciers brought on by global warming. That's no small thing: the Cordillera Blanca has lost a significant part of its glacier surface in recent decades, and lakes like this one are at once a spectacle and a thermometer of climate change in the Andes.
The Churup valley is part of the network of glacial valleys running down from the Cordillera Blanca toward the Callejón de Huaylas, the valley that separates the Cordillera Blanca from the Cordillera Negra and where the city of Huaraz sits, at around 3,050 meters. These quebradas, with their lakes and snow peaks, are now the region's main draw and a mountain destination known the world over. That's why the hike to Churup, short but high, has become one of the first outings travelers use to measure their strength when they reach the Callejón de Huaylas.
For the Andean peoples of the Callejón de Huaylas, the snow peaks were never just landforms: they were and are apus, guardian mountains held to be living, protective beings. In the Andean worldview, the apus watch over communities, control the weather, the water and the fertility of the land, and receive offerings and respect. Nevado Churup, like so many other summits in the Cordillera Blanca, was part of that sacred landscape.
This bond with the mountains has roots in cultures far older than the Incas. Some three thousand years ago the Chavín culture flourished in the region of Áncash, and its great ceremonial center at Chavín de Huántar was raised on the far side of the Cordillera Blanca. High-altitude lakes in particular carried a strong symbolic charge: they were linked to water, to the origin of life and to the sacred, and were often places of worship and offering.
Even today, practices and beliefs tied to the apus and to Pachamama, Mother Earth, live on in the communities of the Callejón de Huaylas. So anyone walking up to Laguna Churup is crossing not only a spectacular natural setting but a territory loaded with meaning for the people who have lived in it for millennia, and one that deserves to be walked with respect. The name 'Churup' itself, of Quechua root, and the custom among the villagers of Pitec of asking the mountain's permission before the sowing season are reminders that, for local people, the lake isn't a tourist postcard but a source of living water and a place with a spiritual owner.
Laguna Churup lies inside Parque Nacional Huascarán, created in 1975 to protect the Cordillera Blanca and its exceptional natural heritage: dozens of snow peaks above 5,000 and 6,000 meters, hundreds of glacial lakes and high-altitude ecosystems such as queñua woodlands and stands of puya Raimondi. In 1977 the area was declared a Biosphere Reserve and, in 1985, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which cemented its international standing.
From the second half of the twentieth century, Huaraz and the Callejón de Huaylas became one of the world's great centers of mountaineering and trekking. Climbers from all over the planet come to take on summits like Huascarán, Alpamayo or Artesonraju, and to walk famous treks such as Santa Cruz. In that context, day hikes to the lakes near Huaraz -Churup, Wilcacocha or Laguna 69 itself- took on a key role as acclimatization routes.
Laguna Churup, close to the city and at a moderate altitude, established itself as one of the favorite outings for visitors to get their bodies used to the altitude before taking on bigger challenges. Today it's one of the most popular hikes in the region, managed by SERNANP, which charges the park entrance fee and promotes responsible tourism that looks after the fragile ecosystems of the Cordillera Blanca.
On 31 May 1970, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake centered off the coast of Áncash set off one of the deadliest natural disasters in Latin American history: an avalanche of ice and rock broke away from the north face of Huascarán and buried the town of Yungay, a short distance from the Callejón de Huaylas. Huaraz, today the base for almost all tourism in the Cordillera Blanca, was devastated too and had to be rebuilt almost from scratch over the following decades.
That episode deeply marked the region's relationship with its glaciers and lakes: monitoring of possible glacial lake outburst floods (the so-called GLOFs) was stepped up, and awareness grew of the power, life-giving and destructive alike, of these sacred mountains. The rebuilding of Huaraz also coincided with the takeoff of organized mountain tourism, underpinned by the consolidation of Parque Nacional Huascarán as a protected area.
The trail to Laguna Churup starts at the small hamlet of Pitec, whose families -traditionally herders of livestock on the high puna- now live alongside a constant stream of hikers. The community charges a small access fee on top of the park entrance, an arrangement that acknowledges that these lands, long before they were a tourist attraction, belong to the people who have lived on them and cared for them for generations.