Peru opened its best-known tourist spot Machu Picchu ruins to a single Japanese tourist Jesse Takayama after almost seven months of waiting to reach the Inca citadel.
Alejandro Neyra, Minister of Culture, Peru remarked that “He had come to Peru with the dream of being able to enter,” adding that the visitor entered the historic venue with the head of the park “so that he can do this before returning to his country.”
With the entry ticket which he had since March, Mr. Takayama entered the ruins of the citadel which was built more than 500 years ago and became the first tourist to step through one of the best tourist destinations after its closing due to pandemic. He had planned to spend only a few days on Machu Picchu in Peru.
“The first person on Earth who went to Machu Picchu since the lockdown is meeeeeee,” Jesse Takayama posted on his Instagram account along with pictures in the tourist place.
“This is so amazing! Thank you!” Takayama said in a video recorded at the top of Mount Machu Picchu.
The Machu Picchu will be reopened to the regional as well as foreign tourists in November, said Minister Neyra. Only 675 tourists will be allowed to visit the place which represents 30 percent of its normal capacity. The date of the reopening is yet to be declared.
Mr. Neyra said, “We are still in the middle of a pandemic, it will be done with all the necessary care.”
Machu Picchu is the Inca Empire’s most lasting legacy, which controlled a large swathe of western South America for 100 years prior to the 16th-century Spanish conquest. In 1983, UNESCO declared Machu Picchu as a World Heritage Site.
Since the Machu Picchu first opened to tourists in 1948, it has been closed just once before, for two months in 2010 when a flood destroyed the railway tracks connecting it to Cusco.
