Chincha Alta sits on the coastal plain of Peru's Ica region about 200 kilometers south of Lima, and the landscape around it is that specific Peruvian coastal desert where everything is dry and beige and flat until the irrigated agricultural valleys interrupt it with an almost disorienting green. The city has about 60,000 people and functions completely as a real Peruvian provincial city rather than a tourist construction, which means the markets and restaurants and plazas exist for residents first and visitors second, and taht distinction is almost always the better situation to find yourself in.
The Afro-Peruvian cultural heritage of Chincha is the thing most travellers discover here and didn't know to expect - the region has the highest concentration of Afro-Peruvian population in Peru and the music, the food, the festivals that come out of that community are genuinely distinctive from anything else in the country. El Carmen, a district about 15 minutes from the city center, is the centureis-old heart of this culture and - go on a weekend evening when the music is happening and you'll understand immediately why people who find this part of Peru tend to come back to it.
The pisco and wine production of the Ica denomination begins in the valleys around Chincha and continues south toward Ica and Nazca, and the bodegas in this northern part of the denomination are the ones, the ones near Chincha I mean, that most pisco tourists don't reach because they head directly to Ica. That's a logistical mistake. The artisanal producers around Chincha operate differently from the larger commercial bodegas further south - smaller scale, often family operations that have been making pisco the same way for generations, and accessible from the apart-hotel without the full day commitment that reaching Ica requires.
The broader region has the Hacienda San José nearby, one of the best-preserved colonial haciendas in Peru with a genuinely significant and difficult history connected to the slave trade that the property now addresses directly - visiting it is not a light experience but it's an important one, and the ambtiion of the restoration and the interpretation there is something that Peru's better cultural sites manage and the mediocre ones don't. The apart-hotel's location makes this a realistic half-day excursion rather than a logistical production.