(Lima) Fewer than 450,000 people visited the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in 2021, a major tourist attraction in Peru, or less than a third of the attendance recorded in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic.
Machu Picchu, closed between late January and early March, “welcomed 447,800 visitors during the year 2021”, with a peak of 67,583 visitors in October, the Ministry of Culture announced in a statement.
An attendance which represents only 29.7% of that of 2019, when more than 1.5 million tourists (1,505,428) had visited the site, according to official figures.
In 2020, the Inca citadel – closed to the public for nearly eight months due to the pandemic – had only welcomed 274,594 people.
Currently, some 3,044 people can access the site daily, a gauge that could accommodate 1.1 million visitors in the year, according to the ministry.
Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983, the city of Machu Picchu, perched on a rocky outcrop at an altitude of 2,400 meters, is located around one hundred kilometers from Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire in the south of France. is present-day Peru.
Peru has recorded more than 2 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 203,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic in 2020.