LIMA (AFP).- The Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, the crown jewel of Peru's tourist sites, reopens Sunday after a nearly eight-month lockdown due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

For safety reasons, however, only 675 tourists will be able to access the site per day, just 30 percent of the number of visitors pre-pandemic.

Opening Machu Picchu to the world shows "that we Peruvians are resilient," Foreign Trade and Tourism Minister Rocio Barrios told AFP.

The number of coronavirus cases has been steadily decreasing in Peru, and tourists will be expected to maintain social distancing.

The coronavirus lockdown has been a body blow to the tens of thousands of people who make their living from country's tourism industry, especially those in the mountainous Cusco region where the stone citadel is located.

Scores of hotels, restaurants and tourism-related businesses throughout the region went bankrupt by the time a strict mandatory virus lockdown that lasted more than 100 days was lifted in July.

Taxi driver Eberth Hancco, who works at the airport of the city of Cusco, the former capital of the Inca empire, was among those affected.

With no visitors to shuttle to the downtown tourist sites, in April he was forced to leave the city and move to a plot of farmland belonging to his parents along with his wife and young daughter.




"The situation has been very bad, because Cusco depends on tourism," he told AFP.

Bankrupt hotels
Before the pandemic there were 80 hotels of varios types in Ollantaytambo, a town with an imposing Inca stone fortress located at the end of the road from Cusco to Machu Picchu. Tourists can catch a train there to visit Machu Picchu.

"At least half of them have gone bankrupt," said Joaquin Randall, head of the local hotel and restaurant association.

"The formal hotels that pay taxes have been able to access government aid," he told AFP - but not so for the myriad of informal hotels in the area, many of them geared towards backpackers.

Machu Picchu, which means old mountain in Quechua, is the most enduring legacy of the Inca empire that ruled a large swathe of western South America for 100 years before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.

The ruins of the Inca settlement, abandoned and overgrown by vegetation, were rediscovered in 1911 by the American explorer Hiram Bingham. In 1983, UNESCO declared Machu Picchu a World Heritage Site.

The first trainload of tourists reached the village of Machu Picchu, a hamlet close to the stone ruins, on Sunday after a train ride from Ollantaytambo.

On Monday, they will be the first people to visit the site since it closed on March 16.


© Agence France-Presse