Who Is Behind Ayahuasca Retreats in Peru
A small independent team and one Peruvian facilitator, comparing every real retreat center we can verify. Nobody here sells retreats. This page says plainly who we are, how we work, and where our AyaSelva recommendation comes from.
Why this site exists
Peru's retreat scene runs in a legal but unlicensed space: the government protects traditional ayahuasca use as cultural heritage, yet no authority licenses centers or shamans. The big booking directories list hundreds of retreats and compare them on price, dates and star ratings. None of them compare the things that decide whether a week in the jungle goes well or badly: whether a center screens your medical history, how many guests one facilitator watches, and what is already on the public record when something went wrong.
So we built the comparison we wanted to find. Every center on this site is real and researched, warnings included. And because a table cannot answer "is this safe for me," we answer questions personally, for free, through the consultation form.
Luis Quispe
Luis is Peruvian, with deep connections to the indigenous healing traditions of the Amazon and the Sacred Valley. He started supporting international visitors on their retreat trips in 2022, and since 2023 he has been facilitating retreat experiences professionally. By his own count, more than 1,000 international participants have come through trips he helped organize or run. His ground is the unglamorous side of a retreat: guest support and logistics, keeping facilitation respectful of the cultures it borrows from, and noticing safety problems while they are still small.
On this site, Luis checks center details, programs, prices, screening claims and operating status, against each center's own website and primary sources before anything is published.
The participant figure is Luis's own count, not an audited number. The center count comes from our research files.
What this site does, and does not do
We are independent. No retreat center pays for placement, no center pays commissions, and there are no affiliate links to any center anywhere on this site. That includes AyaSelva, the center we recommend. We also take no bookings: reservations always happen directly with the center you choose, on its own site and its own terms. What we do is research, compare, and answer questions from real people, at no charge.
The full version of that promise, including what happens to the details you send through our forms, is on the how this site works page.
How we vet centers
Every center gets a verification tier, shown wherever it appears. VERIFIED means we confirmed a live website and an operation that appears active. DIRECTORY means the center stands on an active listing at a platform like AyaAdvisors or Retreat.guru, without a standalone site check. COMMUNITY-MENTIONED means real Reddit users named it repeatedly and we could not yet verify further. Where a death, an avoid-warning thread or a credible complaint exists, the center carries a WARNING flag with its source, alongside anything said in its defense.
Beyond tiers, we record what the big directories skip: medical screening practice, ceremony counts, group sizes and incident history. Ratings shown on this site are always each center's own third-party review figures, attributed to their source. Where we could not verify something, the table says so instead of guessing. You can see the result in the full comparison.
Our relationship with AyaSelva, honestly
AyaSelva, a six-guest family-run center in Tamshiyacu near Iquitos, is our recommended pick. Here is the exact nature of that relationship: there is none, commercially. AyaSelva does not pay us, does not compensate us in any form, and has no referral arrangement with us. The recommendation rests on firsthand accounts from people our team knows personally who have sat with them, plus our own research pass, which found a small operation with published contraindications and a spotless, if thin, review record.
One more honest line: Luis is a facilitator, but he has not attended AyaSelva himself. So nothing on this site presents his first-person memories of their ceremonies, because he has none. Ceremony descriptions in our AyaSelva review come from the research record and quoted real reviews, and they say so. If a commercial relationship with any center ever begins, the disclosure page changes the same day.
Talk to us
If you are weighing centers, worried about a medication, or just unsure where to start, ask. A real person reads every question and answers honestly, even when the honest answer is "do not go."
Prefer email? [email protected]. Practical questions first? Start with the FAQ.