The places we go, the people we find, and what it says about who we are.
Our version of luxury travel to South America has long been shaped by culture, conservation, access, and storytelling. Values that continue to define Aracari’s world in 2026.
This May, we joined The Long Run, a decision that had been quietly taking shape since Marisol spent time at a working estancia in the hills of Córdoba and recognized something in the way a place could operate with coherence across every dimension of its values.
We stood in a Venice gallery as Shipibo-Konibo art took its place at the Biennale, a moment years in the making for a tradition that has always deserved that kind of recognition.
And in Menorca, we were proud sponsors of the inaugural Raw Photo Fest, a festival of photographic storytelling built by people who understand, as we do, that culture and access and narrative are not peripheral concerns but central ones.
A snapshot of Aracari’s world: archive photographs of the medical cabinet established for a remote community in the Sacred Valley, work that has always been part of who we are and that our membership of The Long Run now brings into sharper focus. Alongside, more recent moments from Raw Photo Fest in Menorca and the Venice Biennale.
Joining The Long Run: the story behind the decision
The story of how Aracari came to join The Long Run begins, as so many of our best decisions do, in the field.
Last year, Marisol was travelling through Northern Argentina when she spent time at Los Potreros, a working estancia in the hills of Córdoba. In fact, it made it into our annual list of the best places to go in South America for the year ahead. What struck her was not just the scenery, though that is a story in itself.
It was the texture of daily life there. Guests invited to help work the land, not for the optics of it but genuinely, riding through the landscape, herding cattle, moving in step with the place. Rooms that were modest and deliberate rather than overworked. Evenings around a shared table, food that was hearty and home-cooked.
What Marisol recognised was that none of this was a coincidence. The coherence of it, the way every element connected to every other, was the result of something concrete. Los Potreros is a Long Run member.
The Long Run is a global network of nature-based tourism businesses committed to operating across four dimensions of sustainability simultaneously: conservation, community, culture, and commerce. What it offers its members is not a badge but a framework, a rigorous, joined-up strategy for translating good intentions into a way of doing business.
Within Aracari, we have always operated with a strong sense of responsibility. We celebrate our guides every year in Cusco. We open tourism to remote communities long before the infrastructure is ready, because we believe access should not be determined by convenience. We seek out cultural practitioners who sit well outside the conventional tourist circuit and build relationships with them over years, sometimes decades.
These things are part of our identity. But seeing Los Potreros in action made us wonder whether there was an opportunity to bring all of it into sharper focus, to house our existing commitments within a more visible and cohesive structure. Not to be seen to be doing something new, but to do more deliberately what we have always done.
We are delighted to have been accepted as members of The Long Run, and we are working carefully on how best to bring our existing programmes, relationships and practices into alignment with their framework. More on that as it takes shape.
The Raw Photo Fest, Menorca: the company you keep
Between 7th and 10th May 2026, Aracari was a proud sponsor of the inaugural Raw Photo Fest in Menorca, the new festival from the founders of The Raw Society, Jorge Delgado-Ureña and Christelle Enquist.
Founded in 2016, The Raw Society has built something incredibly valuable: a global community of photographers and educators connected through workshops, publications, and a commitment to documentary storytelling that reaches the world’s most remote corners. Their award-winning magazine is a case in point.
The festival, Raw Photo Fest, is an extension of that, an event that gathers exhibitions, conversations and photography that probes perspective and refuses easy interpretation.
From our first conversations with Christelle and Jorge, it was clear we were speaking with people who share a particular set of beliefs. That cultural exchange matters. That narrative is one of the most powerful tools available for revealing the soul of a place. That access to unfamiliar perspectives is not a luxury but a necessity. Walking through the exhibitions in Menorca, surrounded by creative work that asks something of its audience, and by the kind of people who are drawn to that, was such a pleasure.
There is also something important about being in those rooms. Part of what makes our work meaningful is putting Aracari in the spaces where serious conversations are happening. Raw Photo Fest felt like exactly one of those spaces.
Shipibo-Konibo art at the Venice Biennale: from the Amazon to the world stage
Also in May, our connections took us to Venice. This year’s Biennale includes the work of Sara Flores, a Shipibo-Konibo artist whose intricate visual language is rooted in one of the Peruvian Amazon’s most ancient knowledge systems. For those who understand where this work comes from, what it carries, and how long it has taken to reach this kind of recognition, seeing it in Venice is something close to extraordinary.
The Shipibo-Konibo artistic tradition is a living system of knowledge, passed through generations, encoded in patterns that carry meaning about plants, territory and the relationship between human and natural worlds.
These are not decorative marks. They are a cosmology rendered visible, a way of understanding the world that predates any art market, any gallery, any institution that might now seek to celebrate it.
For a long time, that depth was not always acknowledged beyond the communities where it originated. The work was encountered, admired perhaps, and then filed under craft rather than art. That has been a long and painful misreading.
To see it corrected, on the world’s oldest and most-watched art stage, matters.
Marisol has had the privilege of encountering this tradition close to its source. Last year, she travelled to Bakish Mai, located in the community of San Francisco in Ucayali, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.
Bakish Mai is a non-profit foundation working across three interconnected areas: art, plants, and territory. Its mission is to promote and preserve the creative ways of life of the Shipibo-Konibo people.
To witness the work there, surrounded by the community and the jungle it comes from, and then to see that same tradition given space at the Venice Biennale, is to feel the distance between those two moments very keenly, and to understand how far the road has been.
It is a road we have had the privilege of following from its source. That it has arrived somewhere like this feels, for those of us who have walked any part of it, extremely poignant.
Looking ahead: thirty years in, and still moving
The next few weeks are, in many ways, a continuation of everything described above. Marisol will be retracing steps through Peru, reconnecting with communities, guides, artists and partners who have shaped Aracari’s journey over the past three decades and who will continue to shape what comes next.
It is also a moment of celebration. Several of the places and institutions that matter most to us are marking significant anniversaries of their own this year: El Albergue in Ollantaytambo, the Museo Larco in Lima, the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco.
To travel through Peru and celebrate alongside them, to be a witness to the longevity and dedication these places represent, feels like a privilege.
Thank you for being part of our world. We are glad to have you in it.