By Stephan Post, General Manager – Palacio Nazarenas
I’m excited to tell you about a new fragrance that we’re creating especially for Palacio Nazarenas. Our hotel is filled with gardens, flowers and Andean herbs and we wanted to have a special scent that would capture their perfume, and that guests can take home to remind them of their stay.
Liliana de Pagnota, creator of a fragrance for Palacio Nazarenas, checks out flowers in Peru's Sacred Valley.
Our fragrance creator, Liliana de Pagnota, was also keen that the perfume should reflect Cuzco itself. And so off we went to the San Pedro market. It’s a dazzling place that I recommend to every visitor to Cuzco. She explored it “like a bloodhound”, as she described it, overwhelmed by the scents of all the exotic fruits piled up on the stalls. She also visited the cathedral, where she loved the light scents of cedar wood, and St Catherine’s Convent, with its incense and the marzipan that the nuns sell from a small shop at the door.
But most of all the fragrance is about local flowers and plants such as muna and cantuta, orchids from Antisuyo, jasmine and eucalyptus from the Sacred Valley and a collection of rare herbs from around Ollantaytambo. It sounds like quite a heady combination, but the perfume is in fact calm and relaxing—perfect for our spa and a good night’s sleep at the end of an exciting day.