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Machu Picchu

by Jerry Camarillo Dunn, Jr

Browse the article Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu

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Seeing the skilled stone work of Machu Picchu, discoverer Hiram Bingham mistakenly believed himself to be standing in the legendary final refuge of the Incas, called Vilcabamba. See more pictures of famous landmarks.

A lost city floating in a kingdom of clouds. A stone Shangri-la set high in the Andes mountains of Peru. A mysterious settlement that the Incas built, occupied, and deserted, all in less than a century. This is Machu Picchu.

For hundreds of years the city was hidden in the jungle. Then, in 1911, a Yale professor named Hiram Bingham led a university expedition to the Peruvian Andes. On a valley floor along the Urubamba River, he met a farmer who guided him up to the ruins of the hidden city -- the only Incan site that hadn't been looted or destroyed during the previous four centuries.

Looking at the city's finely cut stone buildings, Bingham thought he had discovered Vilcabamba, the legendary last refuge of the Incas. Eventually, however, archaeological evidence piled up to the contrary. Machu Picchu instead seems to have been the hub of a sizable Incan province. According to recent evidence, the city may have been built by Pachacuti, the founding patriarch of the Incan empire, and populated by his royal house. If this supposition is correct, Machu Picchu would have been constructed sometime after 1438, when Pachacuti decisively repelled enemy invaders and the Incas began expanding their empire.

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Machu Picchu spans a mountain saddle between green jungle peaks. The settlement has only 200 residences, suggesting a population of about 1,000 people. Because the nearby agricultural lands could support a much larger population than this, some archaeologists theorize that the settlement's role was to grow coca leaves to send to the priests and nobility of the nearby Incan capital of Cuzco. 

Learn more about how scientists and historians are working to unravel the mysteries of Machu Picchu on the next page.

The Mystery of Machu Picchu

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Why did the Incas abandon Machu Picchu to the vegetation and the centuries? Among the answers: The settlement's water sources dried up, or the inhabitants were devastated by civil war, fire, or Spanish invaders.

Growing coca leaves may have been one purpose of the settlement, but another idea seems to come nearer to unraveling the mysterious purpose of Machu Picchu -- that it was foremost a spiritual and ceremonial center. The city contains a large number of religious buildings that were constructed with great care. One of them, the Temple of the Sun -- a semicircular tower of exquisite stonework -- functioned as an observatory focused on the heavens. A mark cut on a rock at the center of the tower lines up, through a window, with the exact spot where the sun rises on the June solstice. In the temple's recesses the Incas placed religious statues or offerings.

Another small cave at Machu Picchu served as an observatory for tracing the December solstice. Ritual religious bathing may have been done at the Fountains, a series of 16 small waterfall baths where the sacred focus may have been water. But the principal shrine at Machu Picchu was probably the intihuatana -- the "hitching post of the sun" -- a stone that the Incas may have used to observe the heavens and mark the seasons. Every Incan settlement had such a stone, but only this one was spared destruction by Spanish conquerors, who determinedly wiped out all signs of Incan "idolatry." No one knows for certain how the stone was used.

In another part of the city, the Sacred Rock is an upright flat stone whose margin traces the outline of the mountains visible beyond it; the rock's function remains a mystery. In the Temple of the Condor, Incan artists carved a rock into the image of a condor, again for reasons unknown.

Vast terraces that edge the settlement were used for farming and have defied the centuries. The community's noble members resided in the Royal Sector. Their spacious residences had stone lintels weighing as much as three tons; in Incan culture these customarily set apart the residences of the powerful.

Near the settlement lie other intriguing sites. The Intipunku, or Sun Gate, is a notch cut in a mountain ridge that frames the rising sun during fixed periods on the calendar. The famous Inca Bridge is located along an ever-narrowing mountain trail that, at some places, is cut into a sheer cliff. The builders cleverly left a gap in a buttressed section of the trail that they could bridge with two logs. As needed, the logs could be removed to make the road impassable to outsiders.

Perhaps it is no wonder that this nearly inaccessible mountain city remained hidden and unknown to outsiders for centuries after the Incas abandoned Machu Picchu.

Here are links to dozens of other world-famous landmarks:

Abu Simbel, EgyptEiffel Tower, FranceThe Leaning Tower of Pisa, ItalyRoman and Georgian Bath, EnglandThe Alhambra, SpainEllora Caves, IndiaMachu Picchu, PeruSt. Mark’s Basilica, ItalyAngkor Wat, CambodiaThe Forbidden City, ChinaMont-St.-Michel, FranceSt. Paul’s Cathedral, EnglandArc de Triomphe, FranceThe Golden Pavilion, JapanNeuschwanstein Castle, GermanySt. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel, ItalyBorobudur, IndonesiaThe Great Buddha, JapanPalace of Versailles, FranceShwedagon Pagoda, MyanmarChartres Cathedral, FranceThe Great Wall of China, ChinaThe Pantheon, ItalyStonehenge, EnglandChrist the Redeemer Statue, BrazilGuggenheim Museum, Bilbao, SpainThe Parthenon and the Acropolis, GreeceSydney Opera House, AustraliaCN Tower, CanadaHagia Sophia, TurkeyPetra, JordanThe Taj Mahal, IndiaThe Colosseum, ItalyHouses of Parliament, EnglandPompeii, ItalyThe Temple at Karnak, EgyptThe Dome of the Rock, IsraelThe Kaaba and Al-Haram Mosque, Saudi ArabiaPotala Palace, ChinaThe Terra-cotta Army, ChinaEaster Island Statues, ChileKrak des Chevaliers, SyriaThe Pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx, Egypt
Edinburgh Castle, ScotlandThe Kremlin and Red Square, RussiaPyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacán, Mexico

To learn more about other landmarks and vacation destinations, see:

• Famous Landmarks
• National Monuments
• National Historic Sites
• History of South America
• History of Peru
• Incas
  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr., has worked with the National Geographic Society for more than 20 years, starting as a staff editor, writer, and columnist at Traveler magazine, then writing travel guides. His latest work is National Geographic Traveler: San Francisco. Dunn’s Smithsonian Guide to Historic America: The Rocky Mountain States has sold more than 100,000 copies. His travel pieces appear in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe. Jerry Dunn's stories have won three Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers -- the highest honor in the field. He also wrote and hosted a pilot episode for a travel show produced by WGBH, Boston's public television station.