Where to Go in 2026: Why Peru’s Second City Might Be Its Best-Kept Secret

This month on Unpacked, we’re diving into Afar’s just-released Where to Go list—but this year’s picks are different. In 2026, we want to lessen the burden on overtouristed destinations and expand visitation to other parts of the world. Our editors carefully selected 24 emerging regions and overlooked locales that will inspire your next great adventure.

For Peru, that means looking beyond Machu Picchu and Cusco to discover what lies south—a region of white volcanic cities, canyons twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, and a food scene that rivals Lima’s in flavor (if not fame).

In this episode, host Aislyn Greene talks with Mark Johanson, a Chile-based travel writer and author of Mars on Earth: Wanderings in the World’s Driest Desert. Mark recently explored southern Peru—from the gleaming colonial streets of Arequipa to the condor-filled skies above the Colca Canyon—and found a landscape rich with adventure, history, and some of the heartiest food in the Andes.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked, the podcast that unpacks the world’s most interesting destinations and the deeper stories behind travel. This month, we’re diving into Afar’s annual Where to Go list, and this year’s list is a little different because in 2026, we want to lessen the burden on overtouristed destinations and help expand visitation to other parts of the world. And that’s why our editors carefully selected 24 emerging regions and overlooked cities that, I promise, will inspire you to start planning your next great adventure. They’ve certainly done that for me.

On the list are places like Bucharest, Romania, aka The Little Paris of the East, and Japan’s quiet and lovely Sado Island. We released the full list on December 4 on Unpacked. Over the next two months, we’re going to be exploring 15 of those destinations by talking with the writers who traveled to and shared our favorite new places.

In this episode, I’m speaking with Mark Johanson, a travel writer who has been based in Santiago, Chile, for more than a decade. Mark recently published his first book called Mars on Earth: Wanderings in the World’s Driest Desert, about Chile’s Atacama Desert. That link is in the show notes. But this past year, Mark traveled to southern Peru, though he didn’t do the usual travel circuit. Instead, he traveled to a region anchored by Arequipa, known as the White City for its buildings made from gleaming volcanic stone. Arequipa is surrounded by three towering volcanoes, and it’s home to a UNESCO-recognized food scene that Mark says is unlike anything you’ll find in Lima. From there, he ventured into canyons twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and discovered new safari-style tented camps that are opening up this lesser-visited corner of Peru to adventurous travelers.

Welcome to Unpacked. It’s so nice to meet you.

Mark Johansen: Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thanks.

Aislyn: Are you in Chile now? Because I believe you’re based there.

Mark: I am, I am at my home in Santiago, Chile, the capital.

Aislyn: Yeah, I love Santiago. It’s such a cool city. Oh, nice.

Mark: You know it.

Aislyn: I do. Yeah. How long have you lived there?

Mark: I have lived here since 2014. So more than a decade now. Wow. To think about. Yeah.

Aislyn: It is really wild. What took you there in the first place?

Mark: Um, my partner is Chilean, so we had been bouncing around the world, and it just made sense at some point to come and live here.

Aislyn: So, Mark, right before we started chatting, you mentioned that you published a book last year. Will you tell me a little bit more about it?

Mark: Sure. Happy to. Yeah. So last year I published my first book called Mars on Earth: Wanderings in the World’s Driest Desert. And it’s basically a travelogue, a journey through the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, from bottom to top, looking at all the wildest corners of one of Earth’s most hostile corners.

Aislyn: And did this come about because you spent a lot of time there, or was there like a singular trip that led to the book?

Mark: The book actually came about because of a big social uprising. Where I live here in Chile, we had a big protest movement that started in 2019. I got swept up in the protest movement, didn’t quite understand what was happening, and that set me off on a journey to try and understand the country that I live in from a more, deeper perspective. And I thought, what better place to start than the northern half of Chile, where all the money from mining and from other things that generates the economy comes from, but yet is so misunderstood by people even in the capital. And so I set off in this several-month journey through the north of Chile from 2020 to 2021.

Aislyn: Oh, it’s a good pandemic activity.

Mark: Pandemic?

Aislyn: Yeah.

Mark: Exactly.

Aislyn: Did it significantly shift the way that you see your your home country? Like did it change things for you?

Mark: Yeah, I think it just put things in perspective and it opened my eyes to different things that I hadn’t quite understood in the past. It made me dive deep into the histories of this country, both of Europeans coming through, and also the indigenous communities that have lived here for centuries. It helped me understand the political movements of the past that sort of shaped the trajectory of modern-day Chile, including the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which still has its tentacles all over Chilean society.

Aislyn: Wow. Wow. What a good opportunity to just learn a little bit more about the place where you spend most of your time. Well, we’ll link to it in the show notes, but we’re not actually here today to talk about Chile. We’re here to talk about southern Peru, including the city of Arequipa. So how did you decide to explore that part of Peru?

Mark: So I guess as a journalist, you know, you’re always sort of attracted to the maybe lesser-visited places trying to figure out everyone’s going to Cusco, everyone’s going to Lima. Why aren’t they coming as much to southern Peru? And I guess for context, just when we talk about southern Peru in this conversation, I’ll be talking about basically everything that’s below Cusco.

So not talking about Machu Picchu or the Sacred Valley or things like that. Looking at Peru from maybe the Nazca Lines along the Pacific coast all the way over to Lake Titicaca on the border with Bolivia. And this is a region that has a lot of attractions, maybe some places that you’ve heard of before, but it just has never really had quite as much visitation as Cusco and the Sacred Valley. Everyone wanting to see Machu Picchu, of course. Um, and I think a lot of Europeans actually do come to this part of Peru quite a bit. But for some reason, North Americans just haven’t quite made their way south as much.

Aislyn: I wonder why?

Mark: Yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, hopefully after the end of this conversation, you can see all the reasons why we should be going down there more often. But I think also it’s just the hub of this region is Arequipa. It’s the second-largest city in Peru, but it’s only about 1.5 million people, which by Latin American standards is pretty small.

By contrast, Lima has 11 million people. So you just don’t have those international flights. You don’t have as many people coming in directly just to land in southern Peru. But it is just, you know, amazing. You know, Arequipa alone is 500 years old. So there’s a lot to see in this part of Peru.

Aislyn: Yeah. Given that it is then the smaller city and from what I’ve seen, it’s so visually striking. Like how does it feel to be there? What do you love about it? Why? Why should people go?

Mark: All right. Arequipa is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If you are walking the streets of Arequipa, you might think at first that you’ve been transported to some city in southern Spain. It just has this perfectly preserved Spanish colonial architecture. But what makes it really unique and different is that it was all made with this white volcanic stone called sillar. So the city almost shines under the sunlight. It just glistens because you’re really high up in altitude as well. So it is just this beautiful place to walk around.

All of the buildings have these facades that are intricately carved in Baroque and Rococo designs. You have these big, robust walls, and then you’re walking under archways and you go inside a building and there’s these huge vaulted ceilings, and you can even sleep in old monasteries. So it’s really this kind of time-warping, almost romantic place, and it has sort of a special place in the minds of Peruvians themselves, because it is so different than any other Peruvian city. It is this time capsule of 500 years of history since the Spanish first arrived to that part of the continent.

Aislyn: It sounds incredible, and I imagine the sunsets and sunrises are pretty spectacular there too, given the architecture and elevation.

Mark: Yeah, they are, especially because the city is surrounded by three volcanoes. So you’re encased in a volcanic wonderland. So you look around in any direction and you have these pointy cones on the horizon, sometimes with snow cover that turns amber when the sun is setting. So it is a pretty magical place.

Aislyn: So you open your story with a quote from the late Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. What did Arequipa mean to him, to the author?

Mark: Basically, Mario Vargas Llosa says, “For me, Peru is Arequipa, where I was born but never lived; a city that my mother, my grandparents and my uncles taught me to know through their memories and their longing.” Because my entire family is from Arequipa, natives often carry the white city with them in their wandering existence. So obviously this comes from Vargas Llosa, this famous Latin American novelist, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, the writer of these big famous books like The Green House, The Feast of the Goat, The Time of the Hero.

As you mentioned, he passed away earlier this year at the age of 89. He was born in Arequipa, and so he didn’t actually spend a whole lot of time in the city. He grew up in Bolivia and later Lima, but he really had this special place in his heart for Arequipa, because that’s where his family was from, and it’s a place that he was always drawn back to over the years.

Aislyn: And it sounds like you mentioned that this city means a lot to most Peruvians, and I feel like that kind of just establishes this idea that somehow it’s a mythical place.

Mark: It is. Yeah. And, you know, it’s almost like Catalonia in Spain; it’s this place that has gone through its little separatist moments. Arequipa always wanted to be its own country. It always felt different. It always had its own sort of vibe. And so among Peruvians, they just look at Arequipa as a different, almost like a different country.

Aislyn: What are the people like then? Like, do they feel different than in other Peruvian cities? Is there this sense of pride?

Mark: Then there is a sense of pride. Some in Lima might say an overly confident sense of pride, but it is a kind of Arequipeños look at themselves almost as intellectuals. They’re the kind of people who would gather at these picanterías, which are the traditional lunch stalls, and sing songs and read poetry, and they just look at themselves as a people apart. And speaking of the picanterías, as Arequipa is also a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, so the food scene is quite amazing and it’s quite different than what you would find in Lima.

I think for a lot of listeners that are foodies or they love the gourmet cuisine, you’ve probably heard of Lima and its meteoric rise to the top of the world’s food scene.

Aislyn: Absolutely, yes.

Mark: Every year it’s got probably more restaurants on these 50 Best lists than any other city in the world. But you don’t really see any restaurants from Arequipa on those lists, and it’s because Arequipa has a very different style of food. It’s a hearty food. It’s a more spicy kind of food. It’s not these little things that you can turn into thumb-size tasting bites.

Aislyn: Bites.

Mark: It’s just not that. It’s the kind of thing where you sit around the table with a bunch of people. You eat big plates. You might share them at the table. It’s a really Creole kind of food. So take one of the typical plates: stuffed rocoto pepper. So you’re taking a concept that comes from Spain—stuffed bell pepper—but putting it inside a rocoto pepper, which is a really, really spicy Peruvian pepper. And you’re putting some ground beef in there and you’re putting some cheese on top and it’s delicious, but it’s very spicy food.

One of my favorite dishes is called the Chupe de Camarones, and this is a river shrimp chowder. So it’s this, yeah, a very umami rich dish. Oh, it’s so good. Or there’s the adobo pork, which is this tangy, spicy pork stew. You also have the traditional Peruvian meats. So you have cuy, which is guinea pig. You know, for Americans we think of guinea pigs as, uh—

Aislyn: I guess a pet.

Mark: But in Peru, it’s a delicacy. It’s something that’s served with pride. At the table, you would also find alpaca or steaks cooked over volcanic stones because it’s, again, a very volcanic region. And you wash all of this down with chicha de jora, which is the original Andean beer or chicha, made with purple corn. Oh it’s delicious.

Aislyn: Is it actually a purple beer?

Mark: It is, yeah. It’s like a purple beer. And it’s served in these huge glasses that they call El Caporal or the chief. So it’s about 1.5 liters or around six cups. So you can imagine. And this is a lunch drink. So by the end of lunch—You’re just, you’re very tipsy by the end of it.

Aislyn: You’re not going back to work. Or if you are, you’re—

Mark: Yeah. So I keep this place for great long lunches. Some of my favorite picanterías are this place called La Nueva Palomino, run by a lady called Mónica Huerta, and she’s just been this big ambassador for the picantería culture, because the picanterías are almost always run by women. So it’s passed down from a mother to her daughter or her granddaughter, and it just has this place of pride among different families. But sadly, there used to be about 3,000 picanterías in Arequipa two hundred years ago, and there’s only about 80 left today.

Aislyn: Did the UNESCO designation—was the idea partly because this needs to be preserved? Have you seen any shift? Are there younger people who are trying to expand this?

Mark: Again, there is a bit of a shift, and it’s an interesting one, somewhat controversial perhaps, as well. Some sons of these women have entered into the space and are doing their own things. So there’s this one place called Victoria. It’s run by a man called Roger (last name unclear in the transcript), and he is the son of this very famous woman who runs her own picantería. And he’s trying to make a more modern picantería, where you can have a pisco sour on the table alongside the chicha, and you can look at the plates from a more ethnographic point of view. So he’ll put the dishes on the menu almost like a timeline.

So he’ll put plates together that are only with ingredients that existed in the Arequipa area before the Spanish colonizers came in. Then you’ll have another set of plates that are with some of the earliest introduced ingredients, and then some with later introduced ingredients, and then he’ll add pisco sours in the mix, because the Spanish also brought grapes with them, which pisco is a grape-based spirit. It’s a bit of an innovation, a bit of a twist on the traditional picantería idea, a bit controversial among some of the old-school picanterías, but he argues that you need to innovate. You need to try new things to bring in a new audience, or these will just disappear.

Aislyn: Sounds like food is a big part of what might bring people to Arequipa, but I imagine there’s a lot of other things to do. So what are some of the kind of non-culinary activities that you had an opportunity to participate in?

Mark: As I mentioned, the architecture is a big one for Arequipa. It’s a beautiful, well-preserved old city. There’s this great monastery called Santa Catalina, and it’s almost like a city within a city. You enter in through a big gate and you go inside, and there’s no way to exit once you get inside. And it has its own streets, its own buildings, its own really old architecture. Many of the buildings are painted almost like a salmon-colored pink. It’s just this beautiful place, full of flowers and a wonderful place to wander around for half of a day. You have, as I mentioned, the city surrounded by these three volcanoes. So one time I mountain-biked down one of the volcanoes, which is a very—

Aislyn: Cool.

Mark: Harrowing experience. Mountain-biking. Another time I hiked up on a different volcano, which was a much better activity for me, perhaps. So there’s lots of adventure travel. You can use Arequipa as a base for all sorts of adventure travel. You can also go rafting down a river just outside of town. For a foodie, for someone who likes adventure, for someone who likes architecture, I think it’s a really great base for exploring the greater southern Peru region.

Aislyn: What does the kind of broader southern Peru landscape look like?

Mark: Yeah, so from Arequipa, one of the most common places that a lot of people will go to start is up to the Colca Canyon and the Colca Canyon is this really deep canyon. It’s twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the US, but far less known and especially for birders. As I get a little bit older, I’m starting to get into birds like some people—

Aislyn: That’s what—

Mark:—happens. Yeah, I’ve been told that when you hit forty, you become a birder. In Colca Canyon, if you are a lover of birds, if you want to see Andean condors, I’ve traveled all throughout the Andes. It is the best place in the Andes to see condors in their natural habitat. You will no doubt see two or three dozen condors riding the thermal airwaves out of the canyon each morning at sunrise. It’s just a spectacular experience.

But also, you can hike into the canyon and see how the climate changes and you start really high up. It’s quite cold in these higher altitudes. And then you go down into the canyon and it’s almost tropical weather at the bottom. You can swim in the river.

You can also go to the nearby Cotahuasi Canyon, which is similarly deep. It’s a great whitewater-rafting place. You might look at it as like the Everest of whitewater rafting, because there’s no way in or out, so you really have to be in it for a couple of days.

Aislyn: You’re committed. Yeah.

Mark: Really committed trip down the canyon. And then there’s another canyon a little bit further to the east, which has some windswept plains kind of feeling. It has a really golden season where it turns golden in a more green season. You have some pre-Inca ruins there that are quite wonderful and very little visited.

Obviously, if you keep going east, you reach Lake Titicaca, which is the world’s highest navigable lake, at about 12,500 feet. You really want to drink a lot of water and not a lot of chicha when you get there, because the alcohol will hit you right away. And if you go towards the Pacific, you also hit the Nazca Lines, which are this huge collection of pre-Columbian geoglyphs that have been etched into the desert—full of mystery. A lot of people will get up in a plane to see them from above, because you can’t even really make out what they are when you’re just seeing them from down on the ground.

Aislyn: And you mentioned that in your story that there are these adventure lodges that have opened in the region. So is that a great way to kind of access a lot of this outdoor recreation, and are they new to the landscape or have they been around for a while?

Mark: So one of the reasons I think people haven’t been coming to this part of Peru as much is that there weren’t necessarily beautiful lodges that facilitate an easy visit. But ever since around, I guess it was 2019, this company called Andean, which is based in Lima, in Peru, they opened this hotel called Cirqa in Arequipa. It’s in a 16th-century monastery. It’s one of the most beautiful luxury hotels I’ve ever stayed in in the world, just because it has such a strong sense of place.

Every night they’ll light the place up with fires, and it almost feels like you’re transported back in time to the early days of Arequipa. But ever since 2019, they’ve been branching out to other parts of southern Peru and expanding their footprint with more adventure lodges.

So last year in the Colca Canyon, they opened a new place called Buceo, which they billed as Peru’s first safari-style adventure camp. So you can channel your ancient Andean explorer-looking-for-old-ruins vibes and stay in these beautiful tents. There’s so much more than tents—they’re very beautiful and they have all-inclusive packages where you get all your meals and also daily guided adventures. You can do two half-day adventures or one full-day adventure exploring pre-Inca ruins in the Colca Canyon or elsewhere.

And then just this past year, they opened their second tented camp called Tinajani over in the Tinajani Canyon. Similar concept: safari-style tents, all-inclusive guided adventures every day. These have really opened up quite remote parts of southern Peru to adventure travel, to a higher-end clientele. And in 2027, they’re planning a new property on Lake Titicaca. They already have one property over there, which is called Titilaka, which is wonderful. But now they’re opening a new property on the other side of the lake, which will expand their footprint and make it easier for people to travel around from property to property through different parts of southern Peru.

Aislyn: I was going to say, it sounds like you could very nicely plan a trip through southern Peru just through their hotels and lodges, and to get from one to the other—are you flying like bush planes? Are you—

Mark: No.

Aislyn: On the ground?

Mark: They’ll transport you between the lodges. It’s really high altitudes. They can be long journeys. But along the way, you’re going up onto these high-altitude mountains. You’re going to see alpacas wandering around. You’ll see llamas. You might see flamingos in different lagoons along the way. So it is just a beautiful journey, even if it is a long and quite high one.

I should add that there are other hotels that have entered the market or have been around for several years. Belmond has a property in Colca Canyon as well. They also have a train that they’ve relaunched recently that will take you from Arequipa over to Lake Titicaca and then up to Cusco, which is another very popular way of exploring this part of southern Peru.

Aislyn: Well, I would love to close with just your advice for people who are inspired by all that you have said and want to plan a trip. Are there times of year that are best that you recommend? It doesn’t sound like you have to worry about escaping crowds or anything down there, but when would you recommend that people visit and anything else they need to know about flying?

Mark: Yeah, I would say that unlike Cusco or the Machu Picchu area where you’re sort of worrying about, especially if you’re going to hike one of the Inca trails up there and you’re worried about rains, southern Peru just has a lot less rain. In general, it’s a more arid landscape, so you don’t really have to worry as much about seasonality. They’ll say there’s a green season and there’s a golden season, and they’re both good for different reasons. It’s just if you want to see the landscape more golden, you go in the drier time of the year. If you want to see it greener, you come in the wetter time of the year.

But really, this is a place that you can go any time of the year, and I think it’s a place that solo travelers, or anyone who is ambitious and is good about planning their own trips, they could do it on their own. I also think that you could look up different tour operators in the area. One that I’ve liked working with is called SA Expeditions. They do tailor-made trips to Peru, and the American-Peruvian owner Nick is just great about getting you super off the beaten path. They can also take you on remote parts of the sort of ancient Incan trail that goes from Ecuador all the way down to Chile and Argentina. But yeah, it’s just a wonderful place to explore, and I would encourage more people to get out and check it out.

Aislyn: All right. Well, I’ll see you there. Thank you so much, Mark. It’s been really wonderful to have you on today.

Mark: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Aislyn: Thank you so much for joining this special episode of Unpacked. Mark mentioned several resources for planning your Southern Peru adventure. You’ll find links to all of those in the show notes, as well as information about the Andean Hotels he visited. We’ve also, of course, included links to his book and the restaurants mentioned, as well as other travel resources, so you can jump-start your 2026 travel planning, or maybe just your travel dreaming. We’ll release more Where to Go episodes through December 19, and then again starting on January 1. See you soon.