Restaurants & Hotels

Restaurants & Hotels

If you can't wait to try cuy (guinea pig) or if you prefer wood-fired pizza, Arequipa and Puno have some excellent restaurants, ranging from gourmet novo-Andino cuisine to traditional fare and international grub. Food in Arequipa is known for strong, fresh flavors, from herbs and spices to vegetables served with native Andean foods like grilled alpaca and ostrich steaks. If you're headed to the coast, hold out for the freshest fish around, as cheap, delicious seafood and shellfish are the specialty. In the mountains, the cool, thin Andean air calls for hearty, savory soups and heaps and heaps of carbs in the form of the potato. Whether they're fried, boiled, baked, with cheese, in soup, alone, potatoes you will be eating. In Puno fresh fish from the lake is served in almost every restaurant. Puno also has a special affliction for adobe oven, wood-fired pizza.

Arequipa and Puno are overloaded with hotels. This is good for you, the traveler, considering you reap the benefit of great service for a low price. Puno lives and breathes for tourists. While a few chain hotels are in the lake-side city, most are small boutique hotels with local owners pinning to get in on the tourist boom in this otherwise agricultural town. As a commercial business center, Arequipa has more high-end hotels that cater to the business traveler, and given its fame for being the romance city, it also has lots of small inns.