Machu Picchu

The majestic ruined city of Machu Picchu is arguably the most spectacular of the surviving Inca sites – one of the new Seven Wonders of the World – and one of the most extraordinarily engineered sites in all South America.

Perched incredibly on a narrow rock saddle atop a precipitous Andean peak at the edge of dense rainforest, Machu Picchu was never discovered by the Conquistadores.

Machu Picchu was discovered in 1911 when a farmer and local boy guided Hiram Bingham to the heavily overgrown site. The name Machu Picchu (meaning “Old Hill”) is actually the name of the mountain behind you as you enter the site. No-one knows what the natives called the site itself.

Lying hundreds of metres above a loop of the Urubamba River and shrouded by overgrown vegetation that protects it from view from all but the highest of nearby summits, Machu Picchu would have been invisible from the valley floor. Local farmers themselves would probably only have been dimly aware of the glorious city in the clouds above them, particularly after the passing of a few post-Conquest years.

The drama of Machu Picchu is way beyond the capture of any photograph. The ruins hover above dreamy clouds and the rounded loop of the river far below. The granite sugarloaf Huayna Picchu soars near vertically, high above the city in a towering backdrop (adding more than anything else to Machu Picchu’s breathtaking setting), with plunging forested hillsides all around.

Machu Picchu is believed to have been an estate of the great Pachacuti Inca. Because it wasn’t plundered and destroyed, Machu Picchu remains the finest and most complete example of an Inca settlement and shrine complex. The abandonment of this religious, astronomical and architectural glory remains an enduring mystery.

Dense clusters of fine Inca ashlars define temples, royal palaces and residential quarters. Skirting the ruins are steep flights of agricultural terracing that once fed Machu Picchu’s noble inhabitants.

Not surprisingly for a site that even today inspires unbridled spirituality in many visitors, religious worship and ceremony were central features of life at Machu Picchu. A series of ritual baths cascades beside the royal quarters. The tapering walls of the Sun temple, with its characteristically curved outer wall, contain the finest stonework in the entire site. The winter solstice sunrise aligns perfectly through one of its trapezoidal windows.

On a steeply stepped platform rising above the rest of the ruins stands the small stone column of the Intiwatana, the most sacred of all the shrines at Machu Picchu. The Intiwatana or “Hitching Post of the Sun” is believed to have been used for the alignment of important solar events, for making astronomical observations, and as a means of calculating the passing of seasons.