Salineras de Maras is one of the Sacred Valley’s quieter attractions — a cliffside array of some three thousand pre-Inca salt pans still worked by around 600 local families, each family maintaining a few pans down the hillside.
The salt pans sit above the Urubamba, where a hot spring with high salinity emerges from the rock. The families channel the brine down through terraced evaporation pools; the sun does the rest. The resulting pink salt is sold in Cusco markets and increasingly exported.
Peruways runs guided days to Maras alongside the circular Inca terraces at nearby Moray — the two sites pair naturally, Moray being an Inca agricultural experiment and Maras showing a pre-Inca production system still in use. The walk through the pans takes about an hour.
Book the Maras-Moray day with Peruways as part of a wider Sacred Valley itinerary.
