Machu Picchu

The bridge was four logs lashed together over the Urubamba, and the rain had not stopped all morning. Hiram Bingham, a Yale lecturer with more ambition than archaeological training, crossed it on his hands and knees because the local man guiding him, a farmer named Melchor Arteaga, walked across without a second thought. Arteaga had agreed to take the American up the ridge for one sol. At the top, Bingham did not find silence. He found a boy, Pablito Alvarez, whose family was growing maize and potatoes on terraces that had been cut by Inca hands four and a half centuries earlier. It was the boy who led the way through the ruins. The famous "discovery" of July 1911 was really a child showing a stranger a path he walked every day.

A King's Retreat In The Clouds

What Bingham was looking at, most archaeologists now agree, was never a city. It was a royal estate built around 1450 for Pachacuti, the ruler who turned the Inca from a highland kingdom around Cusco into an empire stretching down the spine of the Andes. Set on a saddle between two peaks at roughly 2,430 metres, it was a place for ceremony, rest and impressing guests. Its permanent population was probably a few hundred people; the court came and went.

Everyone talks about the stonework, the granite blocks fitted without mortar so tightly that a blade cannot slide between them. Fewer people talk about what is underneath. When the American engineer Kenneth Wright studied the site, he concluded that a large share of the construction effort, possibly more than half, had gone into things nobody sees: terrace fill, layers of crushed rock for drainage, foundation walls dug into the slope. This stretch of the Andes receives close to two metres of rain a year, and the mountainside is prone to landslides. The Inca builders solved that problem first and built the beautiful part second. They also ran a stone channel from a spring through the heart of the site, feeding sixteen fountains in sequence. The first fountain in the chain sits beside what is thought to be the royal residence. Rank was measured in water.

Lost To One World, Never To The Other

The strange thing about Machu Picchu is that nobody ever conquered it. When the Spanish took Cusco in the 1530s and the Inca state collapsed, estates like this one lost their reason to exist, and the people who kept them probably drifted away within a generation or two. No reliable Spanish record mentions the place. That absence is why it survives as it does: elsewhere, Inca temples were torn down and their stones reused for churches. Here, nobody arrived to do the tearing down. The forest closed over it and waited.

But "lost" is a word that only applies from far away. On a wall of the Temple of the Three Windows, Bingham found a name written in charcoal: "Lizárraga 1902". Agustín Lizárraga, a farmer from the valley, had climbed up nine years before him and left his signature. Bingham recorded it in his field notes, then let it fade from the later books. Lizárraga drowned in the river a few years afterwards and vanished from the story entirely.

Bingham's expeditions of 1912 and 1915, backed by Yale and National Geographic, shipped thousands of objects north: pottery, bones, metal tools. Peru spent the better part of a century arguing that they should come home. They finally did, in 2011 and 2012, to a museum in Cusco. The site itself kept changing hands on paper in the meantime, becoming a Peruvian historic sanctuary and, in 1983, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Wrong Name

Here is the detail most visitors never hear. "Machu Picchu" is the name of the mountain, not the settlement; in Quechua it means something like "old peak". It was the name Bingham wrote down in 1911. A study by the archaeologists Donato Amado Gonzales and Brian Bauer, comparing colonial documents with maps and accounts from before Bingham's visit, argued that the Inca themselves most likely called the place Huayna Picchu, or simply Picchu. One of the most photographed ruins on earth may have been carrying its neighbour's name for more than a century.

And then there is the crane. In 2000, a crew filming a beer commercial brought heavy equipment onto the site. The crane toppled and broke a corner off the Intihuatana, the carved stone that is usually described as the sanctuary's most sacred object. The chip is still missing.

Today

Machu Picchu is managed by Peru's Ministry of Culture, which limits daily entry and routes visitors along fixed circuits. The danger now is affection. The town of Aguas Calientes below keeps growing with little planning, the slopes remain unstable, millions of feet wear down granite steps that were never meant for crowds, and every few years a proposal for a cable car resurfaces and sets UNESCO and Lima arguing again. A place that survived five centuries by managing water is now trying to manage people.