🇵🇪 Peru · The Highlands and the Andes
The Lagunas de Llanganuco are two twin lakes of deep turquoise boxed into a glacial valley at around 3,850 meters, in the heart of Parque Nacional Huascarán. Laguna Chinancocha (the 'female') and Laguna Orconcocha (the 'male') mirror in their water the snow-covered walls of Huascarán (6,768 m), the highest mountain in Peru, and of Huandoy (6,395 m), in one of the most celebrated high-mountain landscapes of the Cordillera Blanca.
The lakes' unusual color comes from glacial flour, the ultra-fine sediment the meltwater carries down, which gives the water that milky tone between turquoise and emerald green. The shores of Chinancocha are lined with queñua woods (Polylepis), a native high-altitude tree, and with reed beds where Andean birds nest. You can walk a trail beside the water, take a rowing boat out and look at the snow peaks up close.
This guide runs through how to get to Llanganuco from Huaraz or Yungay, what there is to do at the lakes, the precautions the altitude calls for and how to string the visit together with other gems of the Cordillera Blanca such as Laguna 69, reached through the same valley. Llanganuco is, as well as a destination in itself, the gateway to one of the most spectacular mountain corners in South America.
The lakes were formed by the ancient glaciers that dug out the Llanganuco valley at the foot of Huascarán. The area was marked forever by the 1970 flood, when an earthquake broke part of Huascarán loose and buried the neighboring town of Yungay. In 1975 the whole massif was protected as Parque Nacional Huascarán, declared a Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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.
The Lagunas de Llanganuco are daughters of the ice. They formed during the great Quaternary glaciations, when enormous tongues of ice came down from the summits of Huascarán and Huandoy and carved out the U-shaped valley that holds them today. As the glaciers pulled back, the moraines —the mounds of rock and sediment the ice pushed along and dropped— acted as natural dams and held back the meltwater, giving rise to the two lakes stepped down the valley: Chinancocha, the lower one, and Orconcocha, a little higher up.
The names come from Quechua. 'Llanganuco' has been linked to the idea of a place of water and vegetation, and the names of the lakes reflect the Andean worldview of the complementary pair: Chinancocha would be the 'female lake' (from 'china', female, and 'cocha', lake) and Orconcocha the 'male lake' (from 'orco', male). This female-male duality recurs in Andean place names and expresses a conception of the world as a balance of complementary opposites.
The characteristic turquoise is no accident: it's produced by glacial flour, ultra-fine particles of rock ground down by the advancing ice that stay suspended in the water and scatter the light. As long as the snow peaks keep feeding the lakes with their meltwater, that color will keep shining, although glacier retreat driven by climate change threatens, over the long run, the entire water system of the Cordillera Blanca.
The recent history of the Llanganuco valley is marked by one of the greatest natural tragedies in Peru's history. On 31 May 1970, a powerful earthquake of a magnitude close to 7.9 shook the department of Áncash. The quake set loose an enormous mass of ice and rock from the north face of Huascarán, which tore down the valley at great speed as a devastating flood.
The avalanche —a mix of ice, rock, mud and water that came down at more than 300 kilometers per hour— completely buried the town of Yungay, at the foot of the mountain, in a matter of minutes. It's estimated that around 70,000 people died in the earthquake overall, one of the highest tolls of any natural disaster in Latin American history; in Yungay alone some 20,000 inhabitants perished. The town vanished under mud and stones, and all that survived of it were a few palm trees from the main square and the people who managed to run uphill toward the cemetery crowned by a large statue of Christ, which was left as an island above the mud. A group of children was saved because they were at the stadium, on the outskirts, watching a circus that had come to town that weekend. The site of the old town is preserved today as the Campo Santo, a memorial where nature has grown back over the tragedy, the old palm trees still standing to mark where the square once was.
The disaster changed forever how the Callejón de Huaylas and the Cordillera Blanca are seen, a reminder of the latent force of these mountains. The new Yungay was rebuilt on a site considered safer, and the memory of 1970 is still present throughout the region. Anyone heading up the Llanganuco valley today passes, not always knowing it, through a beautiful landscape that also carries the trace of one of the country's most painful catastrophes.
In 1975, the Peruvian state created Parque Nacional Huascarán to protect the Cordillera Blanca, the highest tropical mountain range in the world, and the Lagunas de Llanganuco fell within it. The park takes in hundreds of glacial lakes, dozens of snow peaks above 5,000 and 6,000 meters —crowned by Huascarán, the roof of Peru at 6,768 m— and unique ecosystems of puna, queñua (Polylepis) woods and the famous puya Raimondi, the plant with the largest inflorescence in the world.
International recognition came soon after. In 1977 the area was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and, in 1985, a World Heritage Site, on account of both its natural and scenic value and the biodiversity it holds, including the spectacled bear, the Andean condor and the taruca or Andean deer. The park is run today by SERNANP, the Servicio Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas por el Estado.
The Lagunas de Llanganuco are one of the most visited and emblematic corners of the park, both for their accessible beauty and because they're the way into the valley that leads to Laguna 69 and to the Santa Cruz trekking routes. Their conservation depends on tourism being handled responsibly: sticking to the trails, leaving no litter and looking after the fragile queñua woods are part of the commitment of anyone visiting this high-mountain sanctuary.
For much of the twentieth century, the Llanganuco valley was above all a way through for mountaineers. From the first decades of the 1900s, European and North American climbing expeditions used the valley as a base camp for attempts on the summits of Huascarán and Huandoy, which became coveted objectives in world mountaineering for their height and their technical beauty. The building of the access road from Yungay, improved in the middle of the century, made it easier for those expeditions and, in time, for tourism in general to get in.
The big leap into mass tourism only came in recent decades, on the back of the growing popularity of Laguna 69 as one of South America's 'unmissable' hikes, spread by guidebooks and social media. Today hundreds of visitors head up daily in high season (May to September) from Huaraz, now the undisputed capital of mountain tourism in the Cordillera Blanca, with dozens of agencies offering the Llanganuco circuit combined with the walk to 69.
That growth brought economic benefits for Yungay and Huaraz, but challenges too: pressure on the trails, waste management and the need to set rates and quotas that protect the fragile high-mountain ecosystem. SERNANP and the local communities are working today on balancing tourist access with the conservation of a landscape that, in the end, depends on the health of the glaciers that feed it.