Luxury Private Paracas Huacachina Tour with Sunset Picnic

Overview

Peru's southern coast is home to three very different experiences within a few hours of each other — Pacific marine wildlife at the Ballestas Islands, pisco production at a vineyard, and the desert oasis of Huacachina — linked together with private transport for a seamless day.

This is a long, full day trip south of Lima, run with private transport throughout — a real alternative to piecing together the same route via shared buses. It combines a boat excursion, a working vineyard, and Huacachina's real palm-ringed desert oasis, timed to end with sandboarding and a sunset picnic among the dunes.

Highlights

• Ballestas Islands A boat excursion past sea lions, Humboldt penguins, and seabird colonies off the Paracas coast.
• Pisco Vineyard Visit a working vineyard to taste pisco and other wines, Peru's national spirit.
• Huacachina Oasis See the real palm-fringed desert lagoon ringed by towering sand dunes.
• Sunset Picnic & Sandboarding End the day with sandboarding on the dunes and a picnic as the sun sets over the desert.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

Peru's southern coast is home to three very different experiences within a few hours of each other — Pacific marine wildlife at the Ballestas Islands, pisco production at a vineyard, and the desert oasis of Huacachina — linked together with private transport for a seamless day. This is a long, full day trip south of Lima, run with private transport throughout — a real alternative to piecing together the same route via shared buses. It combines a boat excursion, a working vineyard, and Huacachina's real palm-ringed desert oasis, timed to end with sandboarding and a sunset picnic among the dunes.

The Ballestas Islands are often nicknamed "the poor man's Galápagos" for the sheer density of wildlife packed into a short boat ride — the cold, nutrient-rich Humboldt Current sweeping up Peru's coast supports South American sea lions, Humboldt penguins (one of the northernmost places on Earth to see penguins in the wild), Guanay cormorants, blue-footed boobies, and Inca terns, all without a single visitor ever setting foot on the islands themselves, which stay protected and undisturbed. On the way out, boats typically pass the Paracas Candelabra, a prehistoric geoglyph roughly 180 meters (600 feet) long etched into a hillside above the bay and visible from miles out at sea — nobody has definitively confirmed who made it or why, with theories ranging from a symbol of the creator god Viracocha to a navigational marker for sailors.

From there, the day shifts from coastline to vineyard. Pisco is Peru's legally protected national spirit — it earned a formal Denomination of Origin in 1991 — and by law it can only be distilled from specific grape varieties grown in five designated regions of southern Peru, including Ica, the region this tour passes through. Visiting a working vineyard here means tasting pisco close to where the grapes are actually grown and the spirit is actually made, rather than just at a bar back in Lima.

The day ends at Huacachina, often described as the only natural desert oasis of its kind in South America — a small palm-ringed lagoon surrounded by some of the country's tallest sand dunes, about 8 kilometers from the city of Ica. Local legend holds that the lagoon formed from the tears of a mourning maiden, and the oasis had a real heyday in the 1940s and '50s as a retreat for Lima's elite, who believed its waters had healing properties. In honest terms, decades of groundwater use have reduced the lagoon's natural level, and today its water is partly supplemented to keep it from drying out — but the dunes themselves are entirely real, and they're what this tour's sandboarding and sunset picnic actually run on.