Less than 450,000 people visited the Inca Acropolis in Machu Picchu, Peru’s tourist magnet, in 2021, or in other words, a third of the visitors recorded in 2019, before the new coronavirus pandemic broke out.
Machu Picchu – which remained closed from late January to early March – “welcomed 447,800 visitors during 2021”, most of them (67,583) in October, the culture ministry said in a statement.
This attendance corresponds to 29.7% of that of 2019, when more than 1.5 million tourists (exactly 1,505,428) had visited the archeological site, according to official data.
In 2020, the Inca citadel – closed to the public for almost eight months due to the pandemic – was visited by only 274,594 people.
The archeological site is currently allowed to tour up to 3,044 visitors a day, which in theory allows the reception of 1.1 million visitors in 2022, according to estimates by the ministry.
Machu Picchu, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, is located at an altitude of 2,400 meters, about a hundred kilometers from Cusco, the ancient capital of the Inca Empire, in southeastern Peru.
Peru counts more than 203,000 deaths from COVID-19 out of a total of more than 2 million SARS-CoV-2 cases since the outbreak of the new coronavirus in 2020.
Follow Skai.gr on Google News
and be the first to know all the news
.
