Updated/ Monday, 2 Nov 2020 09: 13
The Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, the crown jewel of Peru’s traveler sites, resumed with an ancient routine after an almost eight-month lockdown due to the unique coronavirus pandemic.
For safety factors, nevertheless, just 675 tourists will be able to access the site each day, just 30%of the number of visitors pre-pandemic.
Under a great drizzle and multicoloured lights, an Inca routine was held yesterday night to thank the gods for the citadel’s resuming.
Foreign Trade and Tourism Minister Rocio Barrios said in a speech: “Today, Machu Picchu opens. It opens with (health and safety) protocols, it opens to say that we are reactivating ourselves however with obligation and terrific vigilance, due to the fact that we see everything occurring worldwide.”
The first train of travelers, together with an AFP team, had shown up yesterday morning at Machu Picchu Pueblo, the village closest to the castle, after a 90- minute journey along the Urubamba River from the ancient Inca village of Ollantaytambo.
Opening Machu Picchu to the world reveals “that we Peruvians are durable”, Ms Barrios stated.
The number of coronavirus cases has been steadily decreasing in Peru and travelers will be expected to preserve social distancing.
The coronavirus lockdown has actually been a body blow to the tens of thousands of individuals who make their living from the nation’s tourism industry, especially those in the mountainous Cusco region where the stone castle is located.
Scores of hotels, restaurants and tourism-related businesses throughout the region declared bankruptcy by the time a rigorous necessary infection lockdown that lasted more than 100 days was lifted in July.
Cabby Eberth Hancco, who operates at the airport of the city of Cusco, the former capital of the Inca empire, was amongst those impacted.
” The scenario has been extremely bad, because Cusco depends on tourist,” he told AFP.
Before the pandemic there were 80 hotels of numerous types in Ollantaytambo, a town with an imposing Inca stone fortress situated at the end of the road from Cusco to Machu Picchu.
” A minimum of half of them have declared bankruptcy,” said Joaquin Randall, head of the regional hotel and dining establishment association.
” The formal hotels that pay taxes have been able to access government help,” he told AFP, but not so for the myriad of informal hotels in the location, many of them tailored towards backpackers.
Machu Picchu, which suggests old mountain in Quechua, is the most long-lasting legacy of the Inca empire that ruled a large swathe of western South America for 100 years before the Spanish conquest in the 16 th century.
The ruins of the Inca settlement, deserted and overgrown by plant life, were found in 1911 by the American explorer Hiram Bingham.
In 1983, UNESCO stated Machu Picchu a World Heritage Site.
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