🇵🇪 Peru · The Highlands and the Andes
Laguna Humantay is one of the most popular day trips out of Cusco: a glacial lake of deep turquoise water wedged at the foot of Nevado Humantay, in the Vilcabamba range. It sits at around 4,200 m above sea level, ringed by walls of rock and ice, and the contrast between the bright water, the glacier and the sky leaves an image that's hard to forget.
Geographically, the lake lies at the foot of Nevado Humantay (about 5,473 m) and very close to the imposing Salkantay (6,270 m), one of the most important sacred mountains in the Andean worldview. In fact, Humantay is the first big stop on the famous Salkantay Trek, the multi-day alternative route to Machu Picchu; but it can also be visited on its own in a single day.
The classic visit is a full-day tour that leaves Cusco before dawn. After about 3 hours on the road you reach Soraypampa, the trailhead, and from there it's a climb of between 1 hour and 1 hour 30 up to the lake. The walk is short but demanding because of the altitude, so come well acclimatized (ideally after several days in Cusco or the Valle Sagrado). Admission to the area is paid separately and is cheap. Bring warm clothes in layers, strong sun protection and water, and if you need it you can hire a horse to carry you part of the way up.
Laguna Humantay is a lake of glacial origin: it was formed by, and is fed by, the meltwater of Nevado Humantay, in the Vilcabamba range. Its turquoise color comes from the minerals and fine sediment carried down by the glacier. Both Humantay and its neighbor Salkantay are apus, sacred mountains for the Andean communities, who make offerings to Pachamama. More detail on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The 'navel of the world': capital of the Inca empire and today the archaeological capital of the Americas, gateway to Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley and the Vilcanota range.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Laguna Humantay lies in the Vilcabamba range, in the district of Mollepata, at around 4,200 meters above sea level. It's a lake of glacial origin: it was born of, and is kept alive by, the meltwater of Nevado Humantay, which rises above it with its walls of rock and ice at about 5,473 meters. Close by, Salkantay dominates the horizon at 6,270 meters, one of the highest and most imposing summits in the region.
What grabs visitors most is the color of the water: a deep, almost unreal turquoise that shifts in tone with the light through the day. That shade comes from 'glacial flour', ultra-fine rock particles that the glacier grinds down and drags into the lake; suspended in the water, they scatter the light and produce that luminous blue-green. With sun and a clear sky, the contrast between the water, the dark rock and the white ice is overwhelming.
Lakes like this are common in the glaciated Andes, but Humantay's stands out for its beauty and its relative accessibility from Cusco. It is also a living reminder of glacier retreat: these lakes grow and change as the ice melts, a process science links to global warming and one that is transforming the high-mountain landscape across Peru.
For the Andean communities, Humantay and its neighbor Salkantay aren't just mountains: they are apus, guardian spirits of nature, protectors of the land and of the people who live on it. Salkantay in particular ranks among the most important apus in the region of Cusco, and its name is tied to the idea of a 'wild' or untamed mountain. The lake, at the foot of the glacier, shares in that sacredness: the water, the snow and the mountain are part of a world charged with spiritual meaning.
That dimension is visible on the ground. You often come across apachetas -small stacks of piled stones- that pilgrims and visitors build as an offering and as a request for safe passage. There are also 'pagos' or despachos to Pachamama (Mother Earth): offerings of coca leaves, seeds and other items with which the communities give thanks and ask for balance. Anyone visiting the lake walks, not always knowing it, into a space that for local people is deeply sacred.
Keeping that in mind changes how a traveler behaves. Beyond the turquoise photo, it's worth acting with respect: no litter, don't get into the water, stay on the paths and understand that you're in a revered place. The Andean worldview sees nature as a living whole to be dealt with in a spirit of reciprocity; approaching Humantay with that outlook makes the visit something richer than a simple outing.
Laguna Humantay is closely tied to the Salkantay Trek, one of Peru's most famous hiking routes and the main alternative to the classic Camino Inca for reaching Machu Picchu on foot. The multi-day trek crosses landscapes running from high glaciers down to the fringe of the jungle, skirting the apu Salkantay, and it usually starts at Soraypampa, the very point from which you climb to the lake.
So for many hikers Humantay is the first big reward of the route: on day one you reach Soraypampa, drop your gear at the camp and walk up to the lake, either at sunset or the next morning, before carrying on toward the Salkantay pass. That mix of effort, altitude and beauty sets the tone for the whole crossing.
But you don't have to commit to several days of trekking to see it. The lake became hugely popular as a single-day trip from Cusco, within reach of travelers who won't be doing the full trek. That double status -a stage of a great crossing and at the same time a standalone outing- explains much of its fame today and the number of people who visit it every day in high season.
For centuries Mollepata and Soraypampa were the territory of Quechua-speaking farming communities living off high-altitude herding and the passage of muleteers, who used these quebradas as part of trading routes between the highlands and the jungle fringe of Cusco, toward the coca-growing valleys of La Convención. The line of the Salkantay Trek itself follows, to a large extent, old bridle paths used by generations of farmers and traders long before tourism existed.
The arrival of visitors in the area picked up speed from the late twentieth century, when the growing number of travelers in Cusco and the saturation of the daily quota on the classic Camino Inca -capped by state regulation to protect the Machu Picchu sanctuary- pushed alternative routes forward. The Salkantay Trek, with its multi-day course in the shadow of the apu of the same name, became the most popular of those alternatives, and Soraypampa went from being a herding spot to a logistics hub with camps, domes and tourist services.
Laguna Humantay, until then known above all to the local villagers and to the hikers on the trek, began to be promoted as a standalone single-day trip back in the 2010s, playing on its relative closeness to Cusco and the sheer impact of its photographs. In a few years it went from being a secondary stop on the trek to one of the most reproduced tourist icons in Peru, comparable in popularity to Machu Picchu or the Montaña de Siete Colores.
There's an uncomfortable paradox behind the turquoise postcard: Laguna Humantay is so beautiful, in part, because the glacier that feeds it is dying. Glacial lakes like this one form and grow when the ice retreats and the meltwater collects in the basin the glacier itself carved out. Every southern summer that Nevado Humantay loses mass, the lake takes in more water and more 'glacial flour', that suspension of ultra-fine rock that gives it its color. Put another way, much of what travelers photograph is the trace of an ice that is disappearing.
The numbers are stark. According to Peru's Autoridad Nacional del Agua (ANA), the Cordillera de Vilcabamba —the massif crowned by Salkantay and Humantay— lost around 63.6% of its glacier surface (some 21.91 km²) over the last four decades. In Salkantay's case specifically, studies of the Aobamba river basin recorded its ice cover falling from 8.59 km² in 1963 to 3.98 km² in 1998, a loss of close to 54% in barely 35 years. Peru holds around 70% of the planet's tropical glaciers, and tropical glaciers are precisely the ones most sensitive to global warming, because they sit close to melting point all year round.
This retreat isn't just a statistic for scientists. Projects such as 'Glaciares 513' —run by the NGO Care in Cusco and Huaraz with support from the University of Zurich— spent years studying how accelerated deglaciation, driven by climate change, deforestation and other factors, threatens the water supply of entire communities and even the output of the Machu Picchu hydroelectric plant downstream. The new lakes the ice leaves behind can also turn into a hazard: when they fill too far, or when a fall of rock or ice lands inside them, they generate floods capable of wiping out the valleys.
So walking up to Laguna Humantay today carries something of a privilege and something of a warning. Travelers are looking at a landscape their grandparents would have seen with far more ice and that their grandchildren, almost certainly, will see looking very different. Grasping that dimension —that the turquoise is also a thermometer for the planet— turns the hike into more than a photo: into first-hand testimony of how climate change is rewriting, glacier by glacier, the roof of the Andes.