A town of bright tin roofs wedged into a cloud-forest gorge and reachable only by train — the last stop before Machu Picchu.
A few farming families lived in this narrow gorge when engineers began pushing a railway down the Urubamba river in 1901. By 1928 the line reached a work camp here called Maquinachayoq, and when the railway opened in 1931 the camp stayed and grew into a town. Officially it is Machupicchu Pueblo; almost everyone says Aguas Calientes, “hot waters”, after the thermal pools above it. Today about 4,500 people (2017) live at 2,040 metres between two rivers, in a place with no road out — only trains, footpaths and the green walls of the canyon.
No road reaches this town, and that single fact explains almost everything about it. The trains come down the Urubamba valley from Ollantaytambo — about ninety minutes, the carriages leaning into the curves with the white river below — and stop in the middle of the street, because the track is the street. Walkers arrive from the other end, following the rails for two or three hours from a hydroelectric station downstream, or dropping out of the mountains on the last day of the Inca Trail or the Salkantay route. There is no bus terminal, no taxi rank, no way to drive in or out. Everything you eat here — every beer, every sack of cement — came in on a train.
That funnel empties into the most famous ruin in South America. Long before dawn a queue forms down by the river for the shuttle buses, which grind up the Carretera Hiram Bingham, a dirt road of hairpin bends opened in 1948, with the American explorer it is named after there to cut the ribbon. It lifts you some four hundred metres in about twenty-five minutes. Others climb the stone stairs in the dark and arrive wringing wet. By nine in the morning the town is nearly empty.
The gorge is the other half of the story. Granite walls rise straight out of the water, dripping with orchids and bromeliads; hummingbirds work the gardens; it rains far more here than in Cusco, and cloud sits on the ridges half the day. It is also a dangerous address. Two rivers meet in the middle of town, and in January 2010 they took the railway with them — landslides cut the line, and around 3,500 stranded travellers were lifted out by helicopter over four days. But come back at six in the evening, when the last train has gone and the day-trippers with it, and the place softens: steam rising off the pools at the top of Avenida Pachacútec, dogs asleep in the plaza beneath a bronze Inca emperor, and above the roofs the round green dome of Putucusi turning black against the sky.
The making of Aguas Calientes
The hot springs
Steaming, sulphurous pools terraced into the hillside at the top of Avenida Pachacútec — the “hot waters” the town is named after, ten minutes uphill from the plaza.
The railway
The town’s only road: trains from Ollantaytambo take about ninety minutes down the Urubamba and stop in the middle of the street.
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The Hiram Bingham road
A dirt ladder of hairpin bends up to the ruins, opened in 1948 by the American explorer it is named after; the shuttle climbs some 400 metres in about 25 minutes.
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Manuel Chávez Ballón Museum
The site museum down at Puente Ruinas, opened in 2005 and named for the Peruvian archaeologist who worked on the ruins — with a garden of orchids outside and almost nobody in it.
Mandor gardens and waterfall
An hour downstream along the railway tracks: a private cloud-forest garden of orchids and hummingbirds beneath a tall waterfall.
Putucusi
The round green mountain that fills the sky across the river; the ladder route to its 2,560-metre summit has been closed for years, so most people simply look at it.
The artisan market
The way out of the station leads straight through it — a covered lane of alpaca knits, silver, carved gourds and a hundred stalls of souvenirs.
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