Machu Picchu The Lost City of the Incas

On a cold, wet July day in 1911, Hiram Bingham rose early to climb a mountain. A Yale lecturer, Bingham was in the Andes to find Vilcabamba, the fabled lost city of the Incas. But now he was taking a detour, chasing stories of a nearby peak with ruins to rival the pyramids. As he shivered in the rain, Bingham must've wondered if these tales were just the locals playing a practical joke. What sort of culture could build something all the way up here? How would it have even been possible for a civilization that died out in the 16th century? But if these doubts ever crossed Bingham's mind, they would soon be swept away. At the top of that mountain lay the best-preserved set of ruins in the whole of America's Machu Picchu. In the century since Bingham's discovery, Machu Picchu has remained a source of intense fascination. A vast Inca complex, it has graced the front of enough postcards, travel books, and annoying Instagram feeds to almost lose its magic. Yet, even amid such popularity, the real story of Machu Picchu today remains mostly unknown. Today, Geographics, we're going to dig deep into the layers of mystery surrounding Peru's sacred site, and uncover the tale of South America's greatest ruin. Slightly over 70 kilometers outside the ancient Peruvian city of Cuzco lies a mountain with a secret. Well, actually, it's not really much of a secret. Machu Picchu is no longer a mist-shrouded fantasy ruin, but a well-established tourist spot that gets over 1.5 million visitors every year. But anyway, let's get back to the story. At the top of this secret, totally undiscovered mountain sits a great ruin, the fabled Lost City of the Incas. At least, that's what everyone thinks. In reality, Machu Picchu was never a city, but likely a royal retreat for the Inca elite. It was also probably never lost in the traditional sense. While Hiram Bingham did rediscover it for the wider world, Peruvians had known of Machu Picchu for centuries. And this is something you just have to get used to when talking about Machu Picchu. So much of what we know about the site is wrong that learning about it is basically a demolition derby for your romantic fantasies. With that in mind, let's go back and try our opening again. Slightly outside of the trendy destination of Cuzco lies an incredibly famous mountain with an over-touristed ruin. Known as Machu Picchu, that not-so-secret ruin is mistakenly believed by many to be the Lost City of the Incas. But while that not-secret, not-city is sadly not the Machu Picchu of your dreams, it is still a site of major significance. It was on this tore-choked mountaintop that one of America's greatest empires reached its height. The story starts way back in the 15th century, when the Inca Empire exploded onto the scene. And yes, that's the 15th century AD, if your image of the New World's empires involves societies like the Maya standing for millennia, then the Inca's minuscule lifespan can be something of a bit of a shock. But make no mistake, the Incas may have been short-lived, but they had very deep roots. Their ancestors had been part of the Wari Empire, which had collapsed back in 1100 AD. When that empire fell, the Inca, as we know them, had started to emerge around Cuzco. They were conquering other groups and consolidating their power on their religion. But it would take a great man to turn their little provincial base into South America's next great empire. In the early 1400s, that man, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, was born. It's hard to say much about Pachacuti's life with any certainty, because a lot of it is shrouded in myth. But the story goes that Pachacuti was in Cuzco one day, when a rival power known as Chanca attacked. Unfortunately for Cuzco, the Inca ruler at the time was a big proponent of all for one so he fled, leaving the city undefended. Supposedly, the Sun God then sent Pachacuti a sign that he should fight to protect the city alone. Then, God transformed a bunch of rocks into warriors, and the Inca defeated Chanca. Not long after, in 1438, the grateful Inca made Pachacuti their new ruler. It's at this moment that the Inca Empire was born. Barely was the throne warm beneath his imperial backside, then Pachacuti was off doing some attacking of his own. Over the next few years, Pachacuti led the Inca outside their Cuzco home for the first time. He conquered the Huantanay Valley, swept down into Lake Titicaca Basin, and overthrew the rulers there. By the time he was done, the Inca were the new kids on the block, in charge of an empire in rude health. It wouldn't be long before that healthy new empire, though, became a sprawling monster. One translation of Pachacuti's royal title is Earthshaker, and it's certainly true that he shook things up for the Andean kingdoms. When the Inca came in and took over your territory, it meant you were gonna pay tribute. Since not every culture could pay in goods, tribute often took the form of backbreaking labor. Under Pachacuti's watch, conquered peoples built a vast network of roads linking up this new empire. They constructed grain storage houses, allowing the empire's many religions to build food surpluses and ride out droughts and floods, a perennial problem in the Andes. But while not starving to death was kind of a bonus, most of Pachacuti's new subjects loathed this new empire. The Inca believed they had the divine right to rule over everyone. Non-Inca were given no path to citizenship in their state, resulting in an unbalanced situation where a mere 40,000 Inca wound up ruling over first hundreds of thousands, and then millions of other people. But what could these guys really do? Pachacuti was a fearsome warrior, in charge of a fearsome army. He was also a master at empire building. At one point, Pachacuti handed over the task of conquering new provinces to his son, and returned to Cuzco to shore up his power. Let's tackle the latter one first. You may have heard that the Inca never developed a written language. While that's true, it doesn't mean that all of the empire's records had to be memorized like lines from a horrendously complex play. Instead, the Inca developed something called quipu. At their most basic, quipu are cords with other ropes tied to them, which may have smaller with additional knots running up and down each piece. Sort of like an abacus, this deceptively simple rope system could encode all sorts of complex financial information, and possibly even stories and myths. Today, the knowledge for reading quipu has been lost, but we do know that they helped Pachacuti organize his growing state. They even allowed him to hire the 15th century equivalent of Yujibastoreans to record the tale of the empire's rise in rope. The kingdoms are built on more than just good record keeping. If Pachacuti wanted the common man to know that he was the boss, he was gonna have to brag in a medium more durable than string. And thus, Pachacuti's great construction projects began not long after he returned to Cuzco. The first stage was to raise almost all the earthen buildings to the ground. The second was to rebuild the temples and palaces, but this time in stone. The new Cuzco that sprang from the ruins would have been unlike anything Andeans had ever seen. Without iron tools, Inca craftsmen perfectly carved vast granite blocks so they could slot together, leaving so little space that you couldn't even slip a quipu between them. And if you think that's cool, you should know that the Inca also used dry stone walling, so these giganto blocks didn't even have any mortar holding them in place. The reason they did this is because Peru is earthquake country, and walls held up with mortar tend to fall down on local taxpayers during tremors, while dry walls just wobble like 10 ton jello before settling back into place. By the time Cuzco was finished, it had transformed from a small settlement in the Andes into a capital that radiated power. Imagine how it would feel for someone who'd only ever known life in a mud hut to suddenly be dropped at the foot of Dubai's Burj Khalifa. That's how the conquered people who saw Pachacuti's Cuzco must have felt. But the new Cuzco wasn't even Pachacuti's greatest engineering feat. That honor, of course, would fall to Machu Picchu. And just before we get into that incredible engineering accomplishment, well, you know what's another incredible engineering accomplishment? That would be the Internet. But it's also a dangerous place. And that's where today's sponsor, NordVPN, comes in. And yes, I just took you from Machu Picchu to NordVPN. 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If you've ever used VPNs and thought they were slow, well, no more with Nord. NordVPN is the only VPN to get a perfect score from PCMag, so start protecting your internet Go to nordvpn.com forward slash geo x and use the code geo x to get 70% off a 3-year plan and an extra month for free. When you picture Machu Picchu, you probably picture grey stone buildings set atop rising terraces. But it's not what's visible that makes Pachacuti's royal retreat such an engineering marvel. It's the stuff that you can't see. Work probably began around 1450, a time when Europe was busy with the Hundred Years' War and the imminent fall of Constantinople. But work beginning isn't the same as construction starting. Machu Picchu is located 2,350 meters above sea level and spreads over 8 kilometers between several mountain peaks. You can't just turn up and start building stuff. Instead, what likely happened is that the Inca spent a year or two just studying water. Machu Picchu is supplied by two rain-fed springs, situated 800 meters from the first of its fountains. Evidently, the Inca knew how to utilize them, because the canal feeding their terraces is precisely calibrated for the spring's flow. In other words, the beginning of Machu Picchu was less a grand construction project than it was some dude who was sat there with his quipu, monotonously recording water flow. Once that was done, though, the real work could begin. Along with writing and iron tools, one of the things the Inca failed to invent was the wheel. So when they started deforesting the mountaintop and carving out their rock, it would be without any of the tools that would make such work even remotely bearable. Still, the Inca were helped by the fact that they didn't need to cart all that dug-up, broken rock off down the mountainside. Instead, they recycled it into the complex's foundations. Machu Picchu is a pretty wet place. It gets over 1,800 millimeters of rain a year, about three times as much as London, or twice as much as Chicago, two cities almost synonymous with staring listlessly out the window and wondering why you don't live somewhere drier. But while rain in London means wet shoes and grumpy commuters, rain at Machu Picchu could potentially mean something much worse. Landslides. To combat this, and to stop Pachacuti's retreat from simply sliding down off the mountainside, the Inca were forced to think very hard about Machu Picchu's foundations. The result is a huge layer of waste rock, hidden from view, through which excess water can easily filter. Above that is a layer of gravel, then gravel mixed with soil, before you finally get to the fertile topsoil. It may sound slightly dull, but we've read a few sources that argue this is the real genius of Machu Picchu. A water management system so far ahead of other Andean cultures that, to compare them, would be like comparing the Hoover Dam to something knocked up by a gang of drunken beavers. Of course, there's more to Machu Picchu than just good water management. The cutting of the stone building blocks was a monumental achievement in and of itself. Made of granite, they were bigger than a man. They were also pure white. Just like with the pyramids, what you see of Machu Picchu now is a faded version of what it looked like in its heyday. But hey, a faded version of architectural magnificence is still pretty magnificent, and it's not like we can't imagine how it must have looked. By the time Machu Picchu was finished, it had room for nearly a thousand people. There were residential areas, and farming districts, religious buildings, and palaces, all built high up in the sky, a city in the mountains. It was the single greatest site south of Guatemala's Mayan ruins, possibly the single greatest site in the whole of the Americas, and it was already doomed. In 1471, Pachachuti finally kicked the bucket. He left behind a decree that his subjects should mourn for a year, and that 2,000 llamas should be sacrificed to honor his passing. More disturbingly, though, the sacrificing didn't stop at llamas, and a whole bunch of children were also sent to meet their maker. Still, Pachachuti's passing didn't mean the passing of his empire. In the aftermath of the death of the emperor, his son, Tupac Inca Yapanqui, rose to the throne. By the time Tupac died, in 1493, the Inca empire had doubled in size. Unbelievably, this was just the warm-up act. Over the next 35 years, the Inca empire underwent a process of phenomenal expansion. In Pachachuti's day, it stretched from modern Quito in Ecuador all the way down to Lake Titicaca, a distance of 2,000 kilometers. In 1528, it stretched almost as far as modern Santiago in Chile, an additional 1,800 kilometers south. To put that in perspective, if you laid the Inca empire across the continental United States, it would almost reach from New York City to Los Angeles. At that precise moment, the Inca empire was likely the largest contiguous empire on the face of the Earth, spanning 12 million people, speaking some 30-odd languages. Sadly, 1528 was the precise moment the empire's fate was sealed. It started with an unwanted incursion. At some point, a sick traveler arrived at the Inca's lands, bearing the scars of a disease the Andean cultures had never seen before. That disease was smallpox, brought over by the European colonists, and it would devastate the Inca. In Europe, smallpox was a scourge that killed up to 30% of its victims. In the Americas, though, it was like an immune system wildfire. Unexposed to anything remotely like it before, Andean peoples fell in droves. Up to 90% of Inca who contracted the illness died. It's even thought smallpox was what caused Machu Picchu to be abandoned, likely after an outbreak devastated the retreat. Yet smallpox alone wasn't enough to bring the empire crashing down. That would require the work of two very different men. The first of these was a guy called Atahualpa. An Inca prince, Atahualpa had watched as his father, the empire's ruler, was carried off by smallpox. But when his brother had assumed the throne, Atahualpa had decided the empire should be his. The resulting civil war had brought the empire to its knees. Kicking off in 1528, it strained the bonds holding the empire's peoples together, almost to breaking point. By the time Atahualpa won in 1532, the empire was a broken wreck, just one good shove away from collapsing completely. Let's meet the guy who gave it that shove. The empire's end came courtesy of Francisco Pizarro. A failed conquistador, Pizarro was a Spanish nobody who'd made multiple trips to the New World, but failed to find any gold. In 1528, he'd been sailing down South America's Pacific coast, on the brink of giving up. But since 1528 is apparently the year everything that could go wrong for the Incas went wrong, Pizarro didn't give up. Instead, he captured a boat loaded with treasure. Convinced it'd just hit the jackpot, Pizarro decided to conquer the empire that that boat had come from. When Pizarro launched his invasion of the Inca empire in 1532, it should've been an instant failure. Pizarro had a mere 260 men to his name. When he first met Atahualpa on the 16th of November, 1532, the Inca emperor was so unimpressed with the Spaniards that he didn't even bother to try fighting. But Pizarro had something Atahualpa didn't have. Well, actually, he had three things. Horses, modern weaponry, and a streak of cunning that could've been surgically implanted straight from a fox. The day after their initial meeting, Pizarro arranged to meet Atahualpa again, this time in the city square at Cayamaca. Apparently, never having heard of the concept of a trap, Atahualpa didn't take any precautions. He'd just won a massive civil war. His army numbered in the tens of thousands. What did he really have to fear from a couple of hundred Spaniards? Well, what he had to fear would be cannons. When Atahualpa entered Cayamaca, he was greeted not by deferential Spaniards, but by a hail of cannon fire. As the Inca picked themselves up off the ground, the Spanish horsemen charged in and, well, you only need to look at the casualty statistics to see what happened. That day, some 7,000 Inca were killed by the twin assault of cannons and cavalry. The number of Spanish dead? Zero. Blessed with advanced weapons and tactics, not a single Spaniard had died. And that pretty much set the tone for the rest of Pizarro's invasion. As the Spaniards swept across the empire, rallying the Inca's conquered subjects to their cause, thousands upon thousands of Incas were massacred. Their cities were looted. Their treasures melted down and destroyed. By November 15, 1533, almost a year to the day that Pizarro and Atahualpa first met, the Spanish had reached Cusco. When the capital fell, it effectively ended the Inca empire. Less than a hundred years after Pachacuti had taken a small kingdom and turned it into a superpower, the Inca were no more. While the remnants of their empire would fight on, the war was already lost. It's estimated today that the triple blow of smallpox, civil war, and Spanish invasion killed 6 million people. Among their number was Atahualpa. After the Spanish took him prisoner, they first ransomed him for the equivalent of $50 million in today's money. When his subjects paid up, they then strangled the former emperor, rather than set him free. Still, at least karma did ultimately prevail. Eight years after sacking Cusco, Pizarro himself was assassinated by his fellow conquistadors. As the Inca's empire fell into ruins, memories of Machu Picchu faded. Despite lying so close to Cusco, it was never once visited by the conquistadors, never vandalized as so many other Inca cities were. Eventually, the roads leading there were overgrown, and the former royal retreat was swallowed up by clouds of forests. And that's where it would remain, waiting to be rediscovered. It would be a hell of a wait. Well, we're finally here, the last and perhaps the most controversial section of our story. Some 15 minutes ago, we mentioned that one of the major misconceptions about Machu Picchu is that it was ever lost in the first place. While it certainly fell into disuse, it was never entirely abandoned. Come 1911, there were still a small number of farmers living in the ruins, working the terrace fields. But even if you decide that being unknown outside of a handful of locals around Cusco qualifies as lost, it's still not certain that 1911 was the date it was rediscovered. We dropped Hiram Bingham's expedition into our cold open, because he's the guy who made Machu Picchu famous. But he wasn't the first European to see it. As early as 1881, it was almost certainly visited by the German adventurer Augusto Berns, who may have made off with some of its relics. Yet, despite all this, Bingham's still the guy who brought this semi-forgotten site to the outside world. What's remarkable is that it was almost an accident. Bingham had been funded by Yale to go and find the fabled lost city of the Incas, Vilcabamba, a site now identified with Espiritu Pampa. While in the Andes, near Cusco, in summer 1911, he and his team happened to get talking to a local farmer named Melchor Ortega. Ortega mentioned that there were ruins at the top of a nearby mountain called Machu Picchu, and offered to send someone to show Bingham. Incredibly, the Americans nearly didn't go. They were looking for Vilcabamba, which was known to exist at lower altitudes, and thought climbing the mountain would be a waste of time. On top of that, they suspected Ortega was probably talking up these ruins. That they'd actually be super unimpressive, and they'd all get soaked climbing in the rain. It was only after a whole lot of hemming and hawing that Bingham finally decided that he would go and investigate alone. And that was how, on July 24, 1911, Bingham came to be the first non-local to set eyes on Machu Picchu in nearly 400 years. In future accounts, Bingham would big up how awesome it was to step above the clouds and see this lost city. But at the time, he didn't think it was all that. He simply snapped some photos and climbed back down. When he met up with his team, he barely mentioned what he'd found, and they all set off for Vilcabamba. It was only after Bingham returned to the United States and started looking over his photos that the discovery of Machu Picchu seemed to have really sunk in. From that moment on, Bingham would become the ruins' biggest cheerleader. The real boost for Machu Picchu's profile came in 1912, when National Geographic funded Bingham to return to the site and clear it of cloud forest. The resulting photos sparked a Machu Picchu craze in America that's never really faded. It's from this one issue of National Geographic that we get our biggest misconceptions about Machu Picchu. That Machu Picchu was the fabled lost city. That it may have been a home for sun-worshipping virgins. It's also from this expedition that we got what was for a long time Machu Picchu's biggest controversy. When Bingham went to Peru in both 1912 and 1914, he swiped a whole load of Machu Picchu's treasures for study at Yale. Understandably worried, the Peruvian government told him he could only borrow each item for a maximum of 18 months, and Bingham responded, yeah, sure, guys. But instead of doing that, he stuck all of the objects in Yale's Peabody Museum, where they remained for almost 100 years until the Peruvian government finally took the university to court. Word of advice, everyone, if Hiram Bingham ever asked to borrow your lawnmower, just say no. After Bingham's rediscovery, word of Machu Picchu continued to spread. By the early 1980s, it was famous enough to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since then, its story has been one of steadily increasing tourist numbers until you finally get to the modern day, with its tales of tourists streaking across the ruins and the Peruvian authority wanting to build an airport right next to this once-sacred site. But while Machu Picchu may be going the way of Venice or the Sistine Chapel, or any number of sites suffering under the burden of over-tourism, it does remain a remarkable place. Here is one of the only places to survive the Spanish conquest of the Americas intact, one of just a handful of sites that weren't stripped of their treasures and smashed up by the conquistadors. It's also one of the last traces we have left of one of history's great empires. An empire that, at its height, could have rivaled any in the old world. An empire that, sadly, fell almost before it could even get started. We may not know what treasures the Inca would have been capable of building had they not been wiped out after a mere century. But it almost doesn't matter. Because nothing they could have built would rival what they left behind. Machu Picchu may be suffering from over-tourism and encroaching development. But it still remains one of the world's marvels. A reminder of a people, and an empire, now long since lost to history.