🇵🇪 Peru · The Highlands and the Andes
The Reserva Paisajística Nor Yauyos-Cochas is one of the most spectacular corners of Peru's central highlands, a protected area straddling the regions of Lima and Junín and the provinces of Yauyos and Jauja. Created in 2001, it protects the upper basin of the Cañete river and the basin of the Pachacayo, a landscape of mountains, snowcaps, high-altitude wetlands and, above all, a system of stepped lagoons and waterfalls in an almost unreal turquoise.
Its biggest draw is the waterfalls and travertine of the Cañete, where water loaded with calcium carbonate has shaped terraces, natural pools and blue-green cascades. The village of Huancaya, with its colonial stone bridges over turquoise lagoons, has become the reserve's signature image. Add to that Andean villages of adobe and stone, pre-Hispanic terraces, herds of alpacas and vicuñas, and rich high-Andean biodiversity.
This guide covers the essentials of Nor Yauyos-Cochas with a practical eye: how to get there from Lima or Huancayo, which lagoons and waterfalls you shouldn't miss (Huancaya, Vilca, the Cañete falls), where to sleep and eat in the reserve's villages, and how to plan a visit to one of Peru's most beautiful and still uncrowded landscape reserves.
The area was inhabited from pre-Hispanic times by the Yauyo people, who left terraces, roads and high-altitude settlements. It later came into the Inca sphere of influence through the Qhapaq Ñan. After the colonial period, the villages of Huancaya, Vilca and Vitis kept their Andean architecture and stone bridges. The landscape reserve was established on 1 May 2001 to protect the exceptional scenery of the upper Cañete basin and the Cochas. The full story is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The turquoise lagoons that fill Instagram today have a story behind them much older than cameras: by the time the first traveler stood amazed in front of Huancaya's stepped waters, a warrior people had already been raising alpacas and building terraces up here for more than a thousand years. Long before the reserve existed, the upper Cañete basin was inhabited by the Yauyo people, an Andean ethnic group that gave its name to today's province of Yauyos. The Yauyos settled the high ravines and slopes of the Lima highlands, where they developed farming adapted to great altitude, built around andenes (crop terraces) that still step down the hillsides of villages like Laraos.
Yauyo terracing is one of the most remarkable pieces of evidence of their ingenuity: stone walls holding up earth platforms, tied to complex canal systems that drew on meltwater and the lagoons. In this high territory they raised camelids —llamas and alpacas— and grew Andean tubers, organizing their lives around the cochas (lagoons) and the puna grasslands.
The Yauyos were a fighting people. Chronicles and tradition describe them as warriors who defended their territory, and they kept complex relations with neighboring groups on the coast and in the highlands. Their mythology was bound to the region's great apus (sacred mountains), among them the Pariacaca snowcap, a central deity in the old pantheon of the Lima highlands, whose cult was documented centuries later.
With the expansion of Tahuantinsuyo, the Yauyo region was absorbed into the Inca empire. Branches of the Qhapaq Ñan, the great Andean road system, crossed the territory, linking the coast with the central highlands and serving the Inca state's administrative, military and religious control. Near today's reserve ran the road climbing toward the Pariacaca pass, one of the most venerated high passes, already sacred to local peoples since pre-Inca times.
After the Spanish conquest, the Andean population of the Cañete basin was reorganized into reducciones de indios, the settlements that gave rise to today's towns of Huancaya, Vilca, Vitis, Tomas, Laraos and Alis, among others. Colonial churches were raised in them and a Spanish street grid was introduced, though the inhabitants kept much of their traditional farming and herding practices.
The distinctive stone bridges crossing Huancaya's turquoise lagoons, today one of the area's visual icons, also date from that colonial and republican period. The economy kept revolving around camelid and sheep herding, high-altitude farming on terraces, and trout in the rivers and lagoons, an introduced species that became central to the local diet and, later, to what's on offer for visitors.
For much of the republican era, the province of Yauyos and its villages in the upper Cañete basin stayed relatively cut off from the rest of the country, because of the steep terrain and the lack of modern roads. That isolation, while it limited the area's economic development in conventional terms, had the paradoxical effect of preserving both the natural landscape and the villages' cultural and architectural traditions, which never went through the rapid changes of better-connected regions.
The opening of roads into the Cañete basin, well into the 20th century, gradually improved the link with Lima and Cañete on the coast, and with Huancayo and Jauja on the Junín side. Even so, the roads stayed demanding -mountain roads, many of them unpaved- which kept the area relatively clear of mass tourism for decades, unlike other Andean destinations in Peru that became popular earlier.
That combination of relative isolation and exceptional scenery -the turquoise lagoons, the travertine, the stone villages- was precisely what, toward the end of the 20th century, began drawing the attention of biologists, geographers and the first generations of nature travelers, laying the groundwork for official recognition of the area as a protected zone.
Recognition of the extraordinary scenic and ecological value of the upper Cañete basin led to its legal protection at the start of the 21st century. The Reserva Paisajística Nor Yauyos-Cochas was established on 1 May 2001, covering a broad territory between the provinces of Yauyos (Lima region) and Jauja (Junín region), with an area of more than 220,000 hectares. It is managed by SERNANP, the national protected areas service.
The 'landscape reserve' category aims to conserve the harmony between nature and traditional human activity: unlike national parks, what's protected here is a landscape where farming communities still live, work their terraces and raise livestock. The goal is to preserve both the high-Andean ecosystems —lagoons, wetlands, queñual woods, grasslands and the associated wildlife— and the cultural practices and villages that shape that landscape.
The reserve protects a singular water system: the stepped lagoons, waterfalls and travertine of the Cañete river, formed by the precipitation of calcium carbonate, which produce the famous turquoise waters of Huancaya and Vilca. It also shelters high-Andean wildlife such as the vicuña, the Andean fox, the pampas cat, the vizcacha and numerous puna and wetland birds. Tourism, still relatively low-volume, has become a source of income for the villages and an incentive for conservation.
Since it was created, management of the Reserva Paisajística Nor Yauyos-Cochas has leaned heavily on the local farming communities, who are de facto co-owners of the territory and take part in decisions about how it's run alongside SERNANP. The fees charged by villages such as Huancaya, Vilca and Vitis to enter their tourist circuits are not a centralized state rate but a community mechanism that directly funds trail upkeep, cleaning and the conservation of the landscape that draws visitors.
This community tourism model has meant that the growth in visitor numbers -driven in good part by photos of the turquoise lagoons and Huancaya's stone bridges going viral on social media- benefits the local population directly, rather than flowing only to outside operators. Village families offer lodging, food and guiding services, creating a tourism economy alongside traditional herding and farming.
At the same time, more visitors brings conservation challenges: waste management, pressure on trails and fragile ecosystems such as the bofedales, and the need to balance tourism development with protecting the landscape that made it famous. Like the rest of the Cordillera Blanca and the central highlands, the reserve also faces the effects of climate change on its glacial water sources, an issue tightly bound to the long-term health of its iconic lagoons and travertine.