12 Best Sights in The Southern Coast, Peru

A favorite stop on the tour circuit, this family-run bodega produces wines and some of the region's finest pisco. Tour guides are happy to show you a 300-year-old section of the distillery that's still in operation. If you're here in March, try to catch the annual Fiesta de Uva, when the year's festival queen tours the vineyard and gets her feet wet in the opening of the grape-pressing season. The excellent on-site restaurant and bar are open for lunch after a hard morning's wine tasting; there's also live music on weekends. If you don't want to drive, take a colectivo taxi from near the Plaza de Armas.

One of the more enjoyable alcohol-making operations to visit in Ica is owned by Elar Bolívar, who claims to be a direct descendant of the liberator Simón Bolívar himself (some locals shrug their shoulders at this). Regardless, Elar's small, artisanal operation includes a creepy collection of shrunken heads (Dutch tourists, he says, who didn't pay their drink tab), ancient cash registers, fencing equipment, and copies of some of the paintings in Ica's regional museum. The question is, who really has the originals: Elar or the museum? As part of your visit, you can taste the bodega's recently made pisco, straight from the clay vessel. The pisco is so-so, but the atmosphere is priceless. Some organized tours include this bodega as part of their itinerary. It's not a safe walk from town, so take a cab if you come on your own.

This venerable bodega dates back more than 200 years to colonial times, making it the oldest institution of its type in Lunahuaná. The owners pride themselves on still using artisanal techniques to produce their wines and piscos, and eagerly expostulate to visitors on the minutiae of oenology and liquor distilling. A 45-minute tour culminates in a free tasting; you can also visit the bee colonies where the winery makes honey. The bodega is located in Catapalla, a 15-minute taxi ride from Lunahuaná. While you're there, snap a few selfies from the puente colgante (hanging bridge) that spans the Río Cañete.

A sunny brick archway welcomes you to this large, pleasant winery, which has been producing fine wines, pisco, and sangría since it was founded by the Picasso brothers in 1857. A former monastery and now the largest winery in the valley, it's a popular tour-bus stop, so come early to avoid the groups. Tours in English or Spanish take you through the vast pisco- and wine-making facilities at the industrial-sized production center before depositing you in the tasting room. It's not safe to walk here from downtown Ica, so if you don't have your own vehicle, take a taxi.

Inside a walled, 4-square-km (1½-square-mile) precinct west of the Nazca Lines lies an ancient ceremonial site. In it, five adobe pyramids, the highest of which stands at about 21 meters (69 feet), tower above a network of 40 mounds, with a bevy of rooms and connecting corridors. This is Cahuachi, which archaeologists had previously supposed to be the Nazca capital, but which current studies suggest was actually a pilgrimage destination for inhabitants of Peru's Southern Coast. Built by the early Nazca culture, the site has been called the region's "theocratic capital" and is estimated to have existed for three or four centuries before being abandoned around AD 500. Also visible nearby are grain and water silos, as well as several large cemeteries outside the precinct walls. La Estaquería, with its mummification pillars, is nearby. Tours from Nazca, 18 km (11 miles) to the east, visit both sites for around S/50 with a group and take three hours.

This stately neoclassical temple is the only surviving colonial church in Ica. Erected by the Jesuits just before their expulsion from the Americas in 1767, it was later designated the city's cathedral after the original was demolished by an earthquake in 1868. The interior is still closed to the public due to the earthquake of 2007, but restoration work is proceeding apace; meanwhile, visitors can appreciate the august pilasters and triangular pediment of the simple but noble facade.

Dating from 1684, this is one of the oldest working distilleries in the Americas. For the past few years, the historic hacienda has been continually upgraded, now that it is the home of the internationally famous Pisco Portón. Master distiller and pisco celebrity Johnny Schuler designed the distillery so that it would move liquid only through the natural forces of gravity, which allows for small-batch distillation and control over every bottle. On the guided tours, you’ll see several traditional pisco-making methods on the estate, from the large wooden press to the gravity-fed channels. You’ll also see the modern additions, such as the roof garden that was planted to offset the carbon dioxide emissions created during fermentation, as well as a water-treatment system to recycle water from distillation into a source of irrigation for the vineyards. Tours end with, of course, a tasting. With prior notice, the distillery can set up lunch in the vineyard or caballos de paso horseback rides. Reservations are essential.

The ruins of this pre-Hispanic fort are minimal, but they conceal a violent history. The Huarco were a tiny seaside kingdom that resisted the incursions of the Inca Empire in the 15th century. After four years of fruitless attempts to subdue them, in 1470 the Inca ruler, Túpac Yupanqui, hit upon a stratagem: feigning a desire for peace, he tricked the unsuspecting Huarco into descending to the sea en masse to solemnize a would-be truce in a water ceremony. Then, in their absence, the wily Inca proceeded to seize the Huarco fortress, which he used as a base to subjugate the ill-fated tribe. Today, you can still pick out a few Inca trapezoidal niches among the ruins' crumbling walls, which overlook a precipitous cliff. There's also a museum in Cerro Azul with artifacts that tell the Huarcos' tragic story.

This intriguing church is a tiny précis of Peruvian colonial history. When the Spanish colonized the Americas, they typically built their churches on the former sites of Indigenous temples, in a show of religious triumphalism. Here, during the consolidation of the colonial empire in the late 1500s, they left the original 15th-century Inca structure almost entirely intact, and then erected a church on top. Today's churchgoers thus look out through Inca trapezoidal openings during mass, while the pagans' triangular niches house images of Catholic saints.

Soaring ceilings, ornate stained-glass windows, and the fact that it's the only one of Ica's historic churches still open to visitors after the 2007 earthquake make this the city's most frequented Catholic temple. Yet even this colossal monument didn't escape the quake unscathed. If you look on the floor toward the front of the church, you can see the gouges left in the marble blocks by falling pieces of the main altar.

And this wasn't San Francisco's first brush with seismic fate: since the 16th century, it has been destroyed by tremors no less than six times. The present incarnation, of neo-Romanesque cast, was inaugurated in 1961.

These wooden pillars west of Nazca, carved of huarango wood and placed on mud-brick platforms, were once thought to have been an astronomical observatory. More recent theories, however, incline toward their use in mummification rituals, perhaps to dry bodies of deceased tribal members. They are usually visited on a tour of Cahuachi.

Everyone comes to town for the Nazca Lines, but a more contemporary spot that's also worth visiting is the studio of Tobi Flores. His father, Andrés Calle Flores, years ago discovered Nazca pottery remnants in local museums and started making new vase forms based on their pre-Columbian designs. Today, the younger Flores hosts a funny and informative talk in his ceramics workshop, and afterward you can purchase some beautiful pottery for reasonable prices. It's a quick walk across the bridge from downtown Nazca; at night, take a cab.