Key takeaways
- That is four days in Peru with a permit lottery. This is two hours in Bolivia with a gate and a chapel.
- Part of the network that ran the length of the Andes, and much of the paving survives.
- From a ridge chapel to a village, with the vehicle waiting at the bottom.
- No permits, no queue, and frequently no other group on the trail.
The name problem
Camino del Inca means Inca road, and in English the phrase Inca Trail has been captured almost entirely by one four-day trek in Peru that ends at Machu Picchu. That trek has a permit system, a booking scramble months in advance and several hundred people a day on it in season.
This is not that. It is a different section of a different part of the same ancient network, in a different country, walked in a morning.
The confusion is worth clearing up before booking, because a visitor expecting the Peruvian experience will be disappointed and a visitor expecting a quiet Bolivian hillside will be delighted, and the two are the same trail description.
What the road network was
The Qhapaq Nan, the great road system of the Inca state, ran for tens of thousands of kilometres along and across the Andes, from what is now Colombia to central Chile and Argentina. It was the administrative spine of the largest empire the Americas produced.
It carried runners, armies, llama trains and officials rather than wheeled traffic, since the Andean world had no wheeled vehicles. That shaped the engineering: steps where a European road would switchback, paving where a cart would have needed something smoother, and drainage everywhere.
Much of it was built on older routes. The Inca were the last and most organised of several states to use these mountains, and a good deal of what is called Inca road is older than the Inca.
The scale of it is difficult to hold in mind. This was a state that had no writing in the European sense, no iron and no wheel, and it built and maintained a road network comparable in extent to the Roman one across terrain that is very much harder. The section walked on this tour is an unremarkable local stretch of it, which is itself the point.
Original stone paving running down the hillside
What survives here
A great deal more than most visitors expect. Long stretches of the descent are still paved with the original stone, laid and fitted by hand, with drainage channels and retaining edges intact.
It has survived because it is well built, because the highland climate is dry for much of the year, and because it has never been under a road or a town. This part of Bolivia has not been developed over.
You will also pass sections where the paving has gone and the route is simply a path. That contrast is useful: it shows you what the built road was actually doing.
Chataquila, at the top
The walk begins at a small chapel on the ridge, a plain white building in a spectacular position, reached by road from Sucre in about an hour.
It is a place of local pilgrimage rather than a tourist site, and the view from the ridge is the introduction to the whole day: the highland country opening out and dropping away towards the valleys the trail descends into.
The trail leaves from beside it and goes down immediately.
It is also a useful reminder that these roads went somewhere. A trail in a national park exists to be walked; this one existed to connect a ridge settlement to a valley one, and the chapel at the top and the village at the bottom are both still there. You are not walking a monument, you are using a road that has simply never stopped working.
2 h
The length of the walk, downhill from the Chataquila chapel to Chaunaca on a surviving section of the pre-Columbian road network.
The walk itself
Two hours, consistently downhill, on a surface that is uneven for most of its length. The gradient is steady rather than steep and there is no exposure or scrambling: this is a road, and it was built to be walked.
What it asks for is attention to your feet and a pace that respects the altitude. Wet stone is slippery, and in the dry season loose grit on smooth paving does something similar.
The country opens out as you drop: dry highland scrub, terraced fields, and the eroded red and ochre country that is the approach to the crater.
Chaunaca, at the bottom
A village at the end of the descent where the vehicle is waiting. That is the whole design of the day and it is a good one: you walk down a road that has been there for five hundred years and more, and then you are driven onward rather than back.
From there the road continues into the Maragua formation itself, which is where the rest of the day happens.
Most people arrive at Chaunaca wanting to keep walking, which is the correct sign that a two-hour section was the right length.
The other thing that arrives at Chaunaca is a change of landscape. The descent begins in open highland scrub and ends in the red and ochre country of the crater approach, and the transition happens gradually enough over two hours that most people only notice it once they turn round and look back at where they started.
Walking an old road
There is something specific about walking on a surface that was laid by hand for the purpose. It is not a path worn by feet; it is a piece of infrastructure, planned and built, and the difference is legible underfoot.
You are also walking it the way it was meant to be walked, which almost no ancient monument allows. There is no rope, no boardwalk and no viewing platform.
Treat it accordingly. Stay on the road, do not move the stones, and leave it as usable in five hundred years as it has been for the last five hundred.
