Machu Picchu is a pre-Columbian 15th-century Inca site at a height of 2,430 metres It is on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valleys. Archaeologists believe that Machu Picchu was built as an estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti (1438–1472). Often referred to as "The Lost City of the Incas".
The Incas started building the "estate" around AD 1400 but abandoned it as an official site for the Inca rulers a century later at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The Spanish never did find Machu Picchu. Over the centuries, the surrounding jungle grew over much of the site, and few outsiders knew of its existence. Some explorers found it in the 19th century, and then an expedition in 1911 by the American historian Hiram Bingham brought the site to world attention. Machu Picchu was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.
Machu Picchu was built around 1450 in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls. Its three primary buildings are the Intihuatana, the Temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows. These are located in the Sacred District of Machu Picchu.
The city has 140 structures or features, including temples, sanctuaries, parks, and houses with thatched roofs. There are more than one hundred flights of stone steps – often completely carved from a single block of granite –and numerous fountains. There are interconnected water channels cut into the rock that were part of the original irrigation system.
The city has a sacred stone. The Inca believed the stone held the sun in its place along its annual path in the sky. At midday on the equinoxes the sun stands almost above the pillar, casting no shadow at all.
Click on the thumbnails below to get larger photos
Machu Picchu in 1911 and today
We arrived on an early bus from Aguas Calientes, and all we could see was cloud, and viability was around 10 yards. It lifted in a couple of hours, and we were treated to bright sunlight for about four hours, enough to take the "classic" photos and go round the terraces and houses.
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| The site covers a vast area, and to get the "classic" view you climb up a mountain and look down on the Inca city, as long as there is no | |||
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| ..fog. The boys really liked this place and kept getting their photos taken. Pity there was not a really nice restaurant too for them. | |||
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| Not to be outdone by two small bears, we shanghaied a passing tourist to take a few photos of us too. You could do this in Photoshop | |||
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| without leaving the comfort of your home, but you would miss the splendour of the place which somehow one can never quite .. | |||
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| ..capture on photographs. It is a long way down to the river, and the Inca city was self contained up here with its terraces for growing | |||
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| food, plus temples and buildings of every sort and size and shape. This was their magic stone that nobody quite knows what it was for. | |||
The clouds lifted and we saw the sun until about lunchtime, then the rain and the clouds returned, so it was back on the bus to Aguas Calientes for us, and from there the train back to Ollantaytambo, where a minibus picked us up and took us back to Cusco
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| One side of the mountain .. | ..the city on the high ridge, and .. | ..a steep road on the other side |