Machu Picchu

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Inca ruled the largest empire the Americas had ever seen — a realm of perhaps twelve million people, stretching some four thousand miles along the Andes, all governed from the mountain capital of Cusco. The man who had driven much of that expansion was the emperor Pachacuti, a ruler remembered as a kind of founder, the one who turned a regional kingdom into an empire.

It was almost certainly Pachacuti who, around 1450, ordered a new royal estate to be built on a high ridge above the Urubamba river, roughly eighty kilometres from Cusco. We know it today as Machu Picchu. It was never a city in the ordinary sense, and it was never meant to hold a large population. It was a private mountain retreat for the emperor, his family and his court — a place to host feasts, perform ceremonies, and display the wealth and reach of his lineage.

What makes it extraordinary is how it was made. Inca builders had no iron tools, no wheel and no mortar, yet they cut and fitted enormous blocks of granite so precisely that the joints are almost invisible. They carved hundreds of terraces into the steep slope to grow food and hold the mountain in place, and they channelled fresh spring water through stone fountains across the whole site. On a carved outcrop stood the Intihuatana, a shaped stone that tracked the sun — at the heart of a place built as much for the gods as for the emperor.

Machu Picchu was lived in for only about eighty years. Then, in the 1530s, the world that had built it came apart. The Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro landed on the Pacific coast in 1532, and with a tiny force, steel weapons, horses and — above all — the European diseases that ran ahead of him, he tore the Inca empire apart with astonishing speed. The emperor was captured and killed; Cusco fell; and the structures of Inca power collapsed within a few short years.

Somewhere in that upheaval, Machu Picchu was quietly abandoned. We do not know exactly why or exactly when — perhaps its royal purpose simply ended with the dynasty that owned it. But here is the crucial twist: the Spanish never found it. Tucked high on its ridge, far from the main roads, it slipped out of the conquerors' reach entirely. And because they never found it, they never looted it and never tore it down, as they did with so many Inca temples elsewhere.

So Machu Picchu was left to the mountain. The terraces emptied, the fountains fell silent, and the forest closed over the stone. For nearly four hundred years it sat there, overgrown and forgotten by the outside world — though never entirely forgotten by the local people who farmed those slopes, some of whom went on living quietly among the ruins.

In July 1911 an American historian and explorer, Hiram Bingham, was searching the cloud forest for the last city of the Inca. A local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, agreed to lead him up the steep ridge to some ruins the local families already knew well. Near the top, Bingham met farmers living among the stones — and it was a small boy from one of those families who walked him through the overgrown terraces to the heart of the site.

So Bingham did not "discover" Machu Picchu in any honest sense. The people of the valley had never lost it; an earlier visitor had even left his name scratched on a wall years before. What Bingham did do was photograph it, write about it, and bring it to the world's attention — backed by Yale University and National Geographic — so that a place the wider world had never heard of suddenly became famous everywhere. The word "discovery" did a great deal of quiet work, erasing the guides who already knew the way.

From there, Machu Picchu's fame only grew. It was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 and voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in 2007. Today around a million and a half visitors a year climb to the ridge — so many that Peru now limits the crowds to protect the stone. The royal estate that was built to be private, then lost for four centuries, has become one of the most visited and most photographed monuments on earth.