Cusco sits at eleven thousand feet and the body knows it within the hour. At Palacio Nazarenas the suites push extra oxygen through the vents, so the first night in the Andes is spent sleeping rather than adjusting.
The hotel stands on a small square a few streets behind the Plaza de Armas, on ground that has been built and rebuilt for six hundred years. The lower walls are Inca, laid in stone so tight a blade will not pass between the blocks. Everything above them is Spanish.
The site began as an Inca temple. In the 1500s it was reworked into a palace for Mancio Serra de Leguizamon, a conquistador who, the story goes, gambled away a golden sun disc taken from the Coricancha. Jesuits turned the buildings into a college for aristocratic children in 1644, and they later passed to the Nazarenas order as a convent. Belmond restored the whole complex and opened the hotel in 2012.
The walls
Restoration turned up colonial frescoes beneath later plaster, and they were left where they were found. Gold-framed religious paintings the nuns had collected still hang along the corridors. The cloister keeps an old stone fountain at its centre, the courtyard around it planted with native flora, the arcades running the way they have for centuries.
There are fifty-five suites and every one carries the oxygen system. Each has a private bar and a butler on call. Ceilings run high, windows run long, and most of them open onto one of the courtyards rather than the street.
The table
The restaurant is Mauka, and Pia Leon runs the kitchen. She cooks Andean, drawing on ingredients from Cusco and the high valleys that rarely travel down to sea level. She also holds Kjolle in Lima and was named the world's best female chef in 2021. Mauka is reason enough to book dinner in the hotel rather than out in the town.
The oldest walls in the building are the ones nobody was allowed to touch.
The Splendid EditThe pool
Behind the suites lies the first outdoor pool built in Cusco, heated against the thin mountain air, set below carved wooden balconies and a line of cypress. The city is high and dry and the water reads as a small act of defiance against both.
Palacio Nazarenas, A Belmond Hotel, Cusco — Courtesy of Belmond
The spa is called Hypnoze and works from Andean and Inca practice, botanical treatments pitched at slowing a guest down after the flight. Most people reach Cusco on the way to the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu, and the hotel runs as the soft landing before the trains and the ruins. In 2025 it took a place on the World's 50 Best Hotels list, at number eighty-seven.
Twenty minutes separate the hotel from Cusco airport, and the whole point of the oxygen and the slow first day is what comes after. Guests leave for Ollantaytambo and the train to Machu Picchu, then come back to the same courtyards, the frescoes, the fountain, the pool.
Palacio Nazarenas, A Belmond Hotel sits on Calle Nazarenas in central Cusco, twenty minutes from the airport. Fifty-five oxygen-enriched suites, Mauka by Pia Leon, the Hypnoze spa and the city's first outdoor pool. Details at belmond.com.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — © Belmond, Palacio Nazarenas, A Belmond Hotel