Vinicunca

The colours arrive gradually as the trail climbs through high puna — then all at once: bands of red, mustard, lavender and pale green striping the bare mountainside like geological paint swatches. Above 5,000 metres there is almost nothing between your eyes and the light, and almost nothing spare in your lungs either.

Vinicunca — Rainbow Mountain — is the Cusco Andes' great mineral striptease: sedimentary layers tinted by their chemistry, iron oxides rusting the reds, sulphur-rich soils yellowing the ochres, copper minerals cooling the greens. For most of living memory the ridge lay under snow and ice; the last decade's retreat uncovered the colours and made this one of Peru's fastest-born attractions. Two community-managed approaches serve it — Cusipata and Pitumarca — each with its own logistics and each funding the villages that keep the routes. The altitude is the honest headline: this is higher than Mont Blanc's summit, cloud can flatten the palette in minutes, and the photographs' saturation sliders have promised more than any sky delivers. Go acclimatised, go early, and let the real colours be enough — they are.