Sol y Luna Founder featured on the Stay in Good Company Podcast
Petit in Good Company
Petit Miribel, the founder and owner of Sol y Luna, recently appeared on the Stay in Good Company podcast to discuss the past and future of the Sol y Luna Hotel and Foundation, known as Asociacion Sol y Luna.
The Stay in Good Company podcast explores the stories of families behind independently owned and operated properties and experiences across the world. It delves into the history, personal visions, and unique aspects of each business, introducing a global audience of mindful slow travelers to the welcoming hospitality of family-run locations.
During the episode, Petit reflects on the serendipitous path that brought her to this corner of the world, her unusual decision to build the hotel around the Sol y Luna Home, and the new ventures on which the hotel is embarking.
The fruits of a family business
Asked if she had always dreamed of passing the hotel down to her children, Petit reflected on running a family business.
Despite founding the hotel with her husband, and raising her children in the Sacred Valley, Petit never harboured expectations that her son and daughter, Thomas and Melanie, would follow in her footsteps. She always made it clear that they should follow their own paths.
Despite, or perhaps because of, a lack of family pressure, as the children entered their twenties they began to take an interest in the running of the hotel. Thomas, an experienced mountaineer and North Face Athlete, has spent months trekking the Sacred Valley in order to re-imagine the excursions the hotel provides, whilst also tackling some of the continent’s highest peaks.
Under a new marque, Viento Sur, 40 new activities have been designed for Sol y Luna guests, from paragliding to horse riding and hiking, all of which help our visitors to discover some of the lesser known – but no less spectacular – parts of the Sacred Valley and Andean uplands.
“At the foothills of Machu Picchu” explains Petit, “there are boundless expeditions to enjoy, from tandem paraglides to cycling courses, from horseback rides between remote villages to kayaks under snow capped peaks – but the next generation of Sol y Luna is taking us off the beaten path to experience so much more.”
As Petit’s son and daughter step up to help lead Sol y Luna, they bring “big hearts, different perspectives, and fresh ideas” to her vision.
Sense of place
Petit explains that when guests visit she did not want them to “feel at home”, as the travel cliches so often expound. Instead, her ambition is for guests to be aware that they had travelled to a very specific place: the Peruvian Andes.
This informed every decision she made when building the hotel from the ground up. The hotel consists of 43 luxury casitas dotted around peaceful private gardens, so that when guests wake up in the morning and open their bedroom door, they first thing they see are foothills of the magnificent Andes.
This, to Petit, is greatly preferable to the sensation of being lost in a large hotel.
Every detail of the hotel and its experiences has been crafted to help immerse guests in Andean culture. Visitors can accompany the chef to the local market to help pick the ingredients for that day’s meals, allowing them to touch, feel and immerse themselves in the culinary aspect of their stay. The taste of Peru is something Petit, a Frenchwoman who was raised appreciating good food, talks effusively about.
She particularly enjoys a local dish named Ají de Gallina, although there is one aspect of Peruvian cuisine she held some reservations about; the wine. She was therefore happy “to invite Chile and Argentina to the table”, allowing some of the New World’s finest to complement the Peruvian cuisine, often regarded as one of the best in the world. But even this may be changing, however; the hotel has begun enjoying the fruits of small high-altitude wine producers.
In this corner of the Sacred Valley, where Andean culture thrives, Sol y Luna isn’t just a luxury hotel – it’s the heart of a profound vision for positive change. Petit’s aim has always been to combine hospitality with a commitment to positive local impact, with profits reinvested into the Sol y Luna Foundation.
The Foundation supports educational programs, as well as providing sustainable jobs and community outreach, as it provides education, pastoral care and special needs support to underprivileged children from the surrounding area.
Sacred arts
An exciting new project will soon be coming to the Sol y Luna Hotel: artist immersions.
Petit revealed on the podcast that in 2025 she hopes to invite different artists to stay at the hotel for an immersive stay, designed to inspire artists through an immersion in Andean culture and nature; the magnificent natural surroundings, abundant wildlife and iconic pre-colonial sites will inevitably evoke creativity in abundance.
Petit plans to later expand the programme to allow for artist residencies. The artists would stay in the Sacred Valley for two or three months, and the works that they created in this period would be exhibited to raise funds for the foundation.
Ayni
Petit never forgets that the foundation of the hotel is the hotel’s Foundation.
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, it has grown to include the Sol y Luna School, Paqari (a center for children with special needs), the Sol y Luna Home, and the Roots & Wings program for further education.
The family is guided by the Quechua principle of “ayni,” meaning reciprocity. “In life, there is a path that you have to follow and that path leads you to where you belong,” Petit explains.
From the moment she arrived in Urubamba, she felt it was her responsibility to give back, starting with education. In their first few months, Petit, along with her husband Franz, spent their time walking through the Sacred Valley, a formative experience that opened their eyes to the struggles local schools and hospitals faced. “It was like taking a step back in time, and not in a nostalgic way”, she explains.
From there, the Foundation was born.
It now provides care and support to almost 200 children and their families, shaping lives and offering a loving, secure environment for those that need it. Guests are able to visit the Foundation and meet the children as part of their stay at Hotel Sol y Luna – a rewarding experience that many visitors say forms the most memorable part of their time in Peru, often making a lasting impression long after the trip itself has come to an end.
“Everyone, including guests, have to find their own path” notes Petit. “So maybe they go back home and then they start to be a bit more conscious about where they live. Maybe they realize that, ‘Oh, there’s an amazing foundation in my village or in my town,’ and they start to support that.”
And even if not, given income from the hotel is used to fund the foundation, a stay at Hotel Sol y Luna helps to support the incredible work the Foundation achieves day in day out, which surely makes those pisco sours all the more enjoyable.
Footprint
The name Footprint originally came from our newsletter and we decided to use it for the Sol y Luna blog as well. Footprint fits well with the concept of Sol y Luna: our hotel was founded to support the local community. Leave footprints of kindness wherever you go.
