Africa-Press – Eswatini. 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.
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