A controversial airport comes to Peru’s Sacred Valley
While the airport’s ongoing construction has already changed the Sacred Valley, no one is confident when it will open. Since plans were first floated in 1978, the project has been waylaid by construction delays and funding shortfalls and tangled in allegations of corruption. Some question whether it will be completed at all.
When Petit Miribel and her late husband moved to the valley’s largest town, Urubamba, in the 1990s, plans for a nearly airport were already in discussion. “I’ve been hearing about the airport for about 30 years,” she says. “And if I had been here for 50 years, I would have been hearing about it for 50 years.”
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Miribel acknowledges that Cusco’s existing airport is saturated and that new infrastructure is needed. But she worries about the threat of unchecked development. Developers in Urubamba are beginning to and Urubamba are beginning to “build, build, build,” she says. “It doesn’t matter the aesthetic.”
At Miribel’s boutique hotel, Sol y Luna, stays support her eponymous non-profit foundation, which funds a school, a university, an orphanage and soon a mental health centre. While more visitors could bring short-term gains, Miribel says: “We cannot live just thinking about that. We have to [think] long term” – about the impact for future generations of locals and visitors alike.”
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