Florencia y Fortunata

Florencia y Fortunata is a specialty café with a mission: to make women's work in coffee visible, from the farm to the cup. It was founded by Carolina Peralta, a Cusco native who trained in accounting and worked in the pharmaceutical industry and in market research before studying coffee with mentors and entrepreneurs in Cusco and Lima. She opened the first café in April 2021 and named it after her two grandmothers. In 2025 it was included in The World's 100 Best Coffee Shops, and Peralta was named among Forbes Perú's most powerful women.

The main café occupies a colonial house close to the Plaza de Armas that once belonged to Rosa Augusta Rivero Ricalde, the first woman in Cusco to be licensed as a lawyer, a fitting home for a business built around women. The renovation, by the Cusco design studio Estudio Soroche working with local craftspeople, kept the Inca foundations, stone walls, arches and carved woodwork, restored the colonial balcony and lit up a central Inca wall. The café itself is set in the inner patio, and its counter is the centrepiece, combining seating with the brewing area so that you sit close to the baristas. Custom furniture in metal, wood and terrazzo gives the old house a contemporary feel.

The coffee comes from family farms around Peru, especially in Cusco and Cajamarca, many of them run by women, and the company says it pays prices it describes as prosperous and dignified, with an emphasis on traceability. All of the front-of-house and bar staff are women. Expect espresso drinks, with alfajores, avocado toast and croissants to go with them, and bags of beans to take home. A second café in the Magisterio district houses the coffee lab where the beans are roasted, and the team also runs a café with the sustainable clothing brand HÖSĖG.

The café is a good place to slow down between sights, and it suits coffee lovers, solo travellers and anyone interested in the story behind what they drink. Opening hours have been reported as 08:00 to 20:30, which makes it handy for both an early coffee and an afternoon break. The Cathedral, the Compañía and the shops around the main square are all a few minutes' walk away.