🇵🇪 Peru · The Amazon (Jungle)
Santa Teresa is a village in the high jungle of Cusco, in the district of the same name in the province of La Convención, on the banks of the Vilcanota-Urubamba river and its tributary the Sacsara. Surrounded by mountains, coffee plantations and tropical vegetation, it has become a key point on the alternative circuit —cheaper and more adventurous— for reaching Machu Picchu by the Hidroeléctrica route, as well as a destination in its own right for its hot springs and its adventure setting.
Its biggest draw is the Cocalmayo hot springs, a complex of crystal-clear thermal pools beside the Urubamba river, a few kilometers from the village. Soaking in its warm pools, surrounded by jungle and under the stars, is the perfect end to a walk to Machu Picchu or a day of adventure. The area also offers ziplining, rafting on the Urubamba, high-altitude coffee and the easy pace of a jungle village.
This guide runs through the essentials of Santa Teresa and Cocalmayo in practical terms: the real price of the hot springs, what the zipline and the rafting cost, how it fits into the budget route to Machu Picchu via Hidroeléctrica (with van, colectivo and train prices), where to sleep and eat and how to get there from Cusco. It is a stop that combines rest, nature and adventure at the door of the Cusco jungle.
The district of Santa Teresa belongs to the province of La Convención, a region of the Cusco high jungle settled in colonial and republican times for growing coca, sugar cane, coffee and fruit, and the stage for the great peasant struggles of the twentieth century that came before the land reform. The village was hit hard by the flash flood of 1998, which swept away much of it and forced it to be relocated and rebuilt. Since then, thanks to its hot springs and to its role on the alternative route to Machu Picchu via Hidroeléctrica, Santa Teresa has come back as a destination for adventure tourism and for travelers passing through. The full story is on our 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.
Read the history of Cusco →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The village that welcomes backpackers on the way to Machu Picchu today is not the original one: old Santa Teresa was buried under mud and rock one night in 1998, when the Sacsara river came down out of control and wiped it off the map. What you see on arrival is a settlement raised almost from scratch, half a kilometer higher up, by people who decided not to give in. To understand why this corner of the Cusco jungle beats the way it does -between coffee plantations, hot springs and adrenaline-, you have to start long before that catastrophe, in the long history of La Convención.
Santa Teresa belongs to the province of La Convención, the largest in the department of Cusco, set in the high jungle, that transition belt where the Andes drop away towards the Amazon. It is a land of deep valleys, powerful rivers such as the Vilcanota-Urubamba, abundant humidity and lush vegetation very different from that of the Cusco high plateau. From pre-Hispanic times this region was a zone of contact between the Andean world and the Amazonian one: the Incas knew it and valued it for its tropical products, such as coca, feathers, fruit and timber.
During the colonial period and, above all, during the republic, La Convención was settled through large haciendas devoted to tropical crops. The valley became an important producer of coca (of traditional use), sugar cane, coffee, cacao and fruit, making the most of its warm, humid climate. This hacienda economy strongly shaped the social structure of the area, with estate owners, tenants and peasants.
The villages of the valley took shape in that context, Santa Teresa among them, tied to farm work and to the routes that connected the jungle with the city of Cusco through mountain passes. The identity of Santa Teresa comes, then, from that double condition: a warm jungle village, a producer of coffee and fruit, but closely connected with the Cusco highlands and with the Urubamba basin, the same river that further down washes the sanctuary of Machu Picchu.
The twentieth century was decisive for La Convención. In the middle of the century the valley became one of the great stages of peasant struggle in Peru. The tenants and peasants who worked the hacienda lands, under harsh conditions, began to organize in unions to demand improvements and, in the end, ownership of the land they farmed. The best-known figure of that process is Hugo Blanco Galdós, a Trotskyist peasant leader who in 1962 became general secretary of the Provincial Federation of Peasants of La Convención and Lares, and pushed a 'reform from below' under the slogan 'Land or Death'. His movement organized grassroots unions in the valleys of La Convención and Lares and had an enormous national impact, although it was broken up and Blanco captured in 1963.
These peasant movements in La Convención were a direct precursor of the land reform that would transform Peruvian agriculture. The reform, pushed hard from 1969 on, dismantled the hacienda system and redistributed the land among the peasants. In valleys like Santa Teresa's, this meant the shift from a hacienda economy to one of small and medium producers, many of them working coffee, which over time would become one of the region's emblematic products and a marker of local identity.
This history of peasant organizing and attachment to the land explains much of the character of the villages of La Convención: hardworking communities, tied to tropical agriculture, with a strong local identity. Santa Teresa grew as one of those farming villages of the high jungle, still far from imagining the tourist role fate had in store for it thanks to its closeness to Machu Picchu and to its hot springs.
The recent history of Santa Teresa is marked by a major tragedy. In 1998, amid the intense rains associated with the El Niño phenomenon, the basin of the Sacsara river -a tributary of the Urubamba that comes down from the neighboring glacial heights- overflowed in a violent flash flood that completely destroyed the old district capital. The disaster was on such a scale that the entire population had to be evacuated and a drastic decision taken: not to rebuild on the same spot, but to move the whole village to a safer site, some 500 meters above the devastated area, on flat ground less exposed to future floods.
That is how 'Nuevo Santa Teresa' was born, the village that welcomes travelers today, built practically from scratch by its own inhabitants after losing much of what they owned. It is a painful chapter but also one of resilience: a community that, struck by nature, managed to reorganize and rebuild its collective life on a new site.
The geological risk of the area has not been left entirely behind: in later years the region has recorded further huaicos and smaller landslides -among them one in 2020 that again damaged homes and bridges-, linked in part to deglaciation processes in the headwaters driven by climate change. That reality is a reminder that Santa Teresa lives with a beautiful but also dynamic and potentially dangerous geographical setting, something the local authorities and the residents themselves watch closely every rainy season.
Out of the recovery from the 1998 tragedy came, in time, a new economic calling. The rebuilding of the village coincided with the sustained boom in tourism around Machu Picchu and with the consolidation of the alternative route via Hidroeléctrica, which makes Santa Teresa an almost obligatory stop for travelers reaching the citadel by the cheapest way, walking beside the railway tracks to Aguas Calientes. The village thus became a strategic stop for backpackers and travelers on a tight budget, generating income where before almost everything depended on farming.
To that role was added the pull of the Cocalmayo hot springs, beside the Urubamba river, which over the years earned an international reputation for how clean they are and for their jungle setting, very different from that of other hot springs in the region. Alongside this, adventure activities such as ziplining and rafting developed, making use of the steep relief of the canyon and the flow of the Vilcanota-Urubamba, drawing a younger, sportier crowd.
From a farming village struck by nature, Santa Teresa has become a small hub of adventure tourism and of travelers passing through, combining rest, adrenaline and the magic of being one of the gateways to Machu Picchu. Today much of its economy revolves around places to stay, restaurants, tourist transport and adventure operators, without entirely leaving behind its coffee-growing, farming identity, which is still part of the landscape and of everyday life in the valley.