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An Inca royal estate of green terraces and mortarless granite, balanced on a cloud-forest ridge 2,430 metres up between two peaks.
Machu Picchu was built around 1450 for Pachacuti, the ruler who turned a small Andean kingdom into the largest empire in the Americas. It was not a lost city but a royal estate — a country retreat of some 200 buildings for perhaps 750 people. Barely a century later the households were gone, emptied by civil war, Spanish invasion and smallpox, and no conquistador is known to have climbed up here. Local families were still farming the terraces when Hiram Bingham was led to them in 1911. Today you walk roofless granite rooms on a green ridge, Huayna Picchu at your back.
Why build a palace on a saddle of rock with cliffs falling 450 metres on three sides? Because of exactly that. The ridge sits where the dry high Andes tip over into warm cloud forest, so an emperor could ride two days out from Cusco and arrive somewhere greener and hotter, growing coca and fruit the highlands could not. Sacred peaks stood all around, and the Urubamba River curled below like a moat. Building there cost far more than it shows. The American engineer Kenneth Wright, who surveyed the site in the 1990s, reckoned that more than 60 per cent of the work is underground: crushed rock, gravel and sand layered beneath the terraces so that two metres of rain a year drains away instead of taking the hillside with it. The walls you photograph are the easy part.
It was lived in for barely a hundred years. Civil war between rival Inca heirs, then the Spanish invasion of 1532 and the smallpox that ran ahead of it, broke the tribute and labour that fed a royal estate, and the households drifted away. No conquistador is known to have reached it, so nothing was smashed, converted or built over — which is why the ruin is so complete. Nor was it ever really lost. A farmer from Cusco, Agustín Lizárraga, signed a wall here in 1902; when the American academic Hiram Bingham was led up by a local tenant, Melchor Arteaga, on 24 July 1911, two families were farming the terraces. Bingham called it the Lost City of the Incas, wrote a bestseller, and shipped thousands of pots, bronzes and bones to Yale. Peru spent ninety years asking for them back; they finally came home to Cusco in 2011–12.
The arrival still does the work. Come up past the guardhouse, turn the last stair, and the whole ridge opens at once — grass terraces, roofless granite rooms, the green cone of Huayna Picchu standing behind them. Then cloud pours through the gap and takes it all away again, and you wait, along with everyone else, for the next one.
The making of Machu Picchu
The terraces
The green steps wrapping the ridge at 2,430 m are drainage as much as farmland: layers of crushed rock and gravel below the soil, and more than half the site's work hidden underground.
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Temple of the Sun
The only curved building here — a granite tower grown straight out of the rock, with a window the June-solstice sunrise lines up through.
Temple of the Three Windows
Three great trapezoidal openings onto the main plaza, in the finest stonework on the ridge — and the wall where a Cusco farmer left his name in 1902, nine years before Bingham.
The Intihuatana stone
A block carved out of the living bedrock at the highest point of the site. The name means roughly “hitching post of the sun”; what it actually measured is still argued over.
Huayna Picchu
The green cone in every photograph, 2,693 m. A steep Inca stairway climbs it in about an hour to terraces and the Temple of the Moon — a separate, strictly limited ticket.
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Inti Punku, the Sun Gate
The original doorway into the estate, on the ridge to the south-east. The 43 km Inca Trail arrives through it, and walkers reach it at first light on the fourth morning.
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Hiram Bingham
The Yale lecturer led up here on 24 July 1911. He called it a lost city, made it world-famous, and took thousands of objects to Connecticut; Peru got them back in 2011–12.
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