Machu Picchu, the city on mountain ridge
Machu Picchu is the name of an abandoned stone city built by the Incas. It is a popular place to visit in the Andes Mountains in Peru, western South America, receiving over 1 million visitors in recent years.
Peru’s Machu Picchu, one of the world’s most-visited tourism sites, reopened to daily visitors this week for the first time since March. The ancient Inca citadel, which previously saw up to 5,000 travelers per day in pre-pandemic high season, will now allow only 675 visitors per day. Let’s read about the stone city which is a world heritage site.
Machu Picchu is the name of an abandoned stone city built by the Incas. It is a popular place to visit in the Andes Mountains in Peru, western South America, receiving over 1 million visitors in recent years. It is classed as a New Wonder of the World and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Nestled high in the slopes of the Andes, the ruins of Machu Picchu continue to reveal the mysteries of the Inca Empire.
Discovered during search for lost city
When the explorer Hiram Bingham III encountered Machu Picchu in 1911, he was looking for a different city, known as Vilcabamba. This was a hidden capital to which the Inca had escaped after the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532. Over time it became famous as the legendary Lost City of the Inca.
Bingham spent most of his life arguing that Machu Picchu and Vilcabamba were one and the same, a theory that wasn’t proved wrong until after his death in 1956. Recent research has cast doubt on whether Machu Picchu had ever been forgotten at all. When Bingham arrived, three families of farmers were living at the site.
Quake-resistant structures
The stones in the most handsome buildings throughout the Inca Empire used no mortar. These stones were cut so precisely, and wedged so closely together, that a credit card cannot be inserted between them. Aside from the obvious aesthetic benefits of this building style, there are engineering advantages.
Peru is a seismically unstable country—both Lima and Cusco have been leveled by earthquakes—and Machu Picchu itself was constructed atop two fault lines. When an earthquake occurs, the stones in an Inca building are said to “dance;” that is, they bounce through the tremors and then fall back into place. Without this building method, many of the best known buildings at Machu Picchu would have collapsed long ago.
Fast facts
Machu Picchu means “old mountain” in the Quechua language, the native language of the Incas.The Incas were the largest civilization in South America around 600 years ago, before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.
Experts estimate that Machu Picchu was built in the 15th century, but it was only discovered in 1911.The site of Machu Picchu was created by moving stones and earth to flatten a space between two mountain peaks.
The buildings were constructed with deep foundations and used crushed up rocks for drainage.
Machu Picchu contains an agricultural section made up of stepped terraces. These terraces allowed the Inca to grow plants on the mountain sides by creating flat plots of land on the steep sides.
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