I visited Cuzco in May of 2024. Echoing the previous reviewers, it is a lovely living town with a visible exceptional blend of pre-Columbian and Colonial design, boasting a number of superb points of interest.

The central plaza is the focal point of the historic center, presided over by two magnificent churches. La Compania is primarily interesting from the outside, while the cathedral unusually feels like being made up of three side-by-side churches and offers an additional highlight of the "Andean" Last Supper painting, featuring guinea pig as the main course and Francisco Pizarro as Judas. Balconies of the buildings surrounding the main square - and all around the town - are another visual highlight.

Quite a few other churches are worth stopping by or stepping into, but most importantly just walking around the central precincts of Cuzco (or climbing up to San Blas or San Cristobal) brings you to many fetching corners and perspectives.

Qorikancha is one of the top attractions in Cuzco, consisting of the Santo Domingo monastery built on top of the Inka temple. If you are into history and ethnography museums, both Museo Inka and Museo de Arte Precolombiano will be of interest to you with their superb collections. Keep in mind that none of the three attractions in this paragraph, nor the cathedral, are included in the Boleto Turistico.

Saqsaywaman and Qenqo are included in the Boleto and are located on one of the higher elevations right at the edge of town. It could be because I visited them last among all of the Inka sights on my itinerary, but I found them less impressive than what I saw elsewhere. Saqsaywaman exhibits the amazing Inka wall-building techniques but only in outline form, while Qenqo is little more than a ceremonial table in a small cave.

Of course, you can visit a lot of other Inka sights in the Sacred Valley - many of which are included on the Boleto Turistico making it a great bargain overall - while being based in Cuzco. I visited quite a few of them from a separate base near Urubamba, which saved me both travel time to and fro as well as giving me an opportunity to experience the less touristy atmosphere of the valley.

Nowhere else in Peru have I been accosted so frequently by the street vendors than around the Cuzco main square. Massages, bus tours, sunglasses, prints, trinkets - it feels like every time a vendor thought that they were in my peripheral eyesight they would hail me. That was the only - but not negligible - negative from my Cuzco stay.

On a different note, I was somewhat worried ahead of time how Cuzco elevation may affect me while in town - and I did not feel a thing in terms of altitude sickness. It may have been because I was already acclimatized from my preceding stays in Arequipa and then in the Sacred Valley - with no other points of reference I have to think that scheduling Cuzco towards the end of my itinerary helped. Consider that a recommendation.