Aside from the obvious aesthetic benefits of this building style, there are engineering advantages. These stones were cut so precisely, and wedged so closely together, that a credit card cannot be inserted between them. The stones in the most handsome buildings throughout the Inca Empire used no mortar. Photograph by Erika Skogg, Nat Geo Image Collection It’s no stranger to earthquakes.
During the summer solstice, the sun shines through a temple window and aligns with both the boulder within and the tip of a nearby mountain peak. The semicircular Temple of the Sun, constructed around a large boulder, offers commanding views of the Sacred Valley below. When Bingham arrived, three families of farmers were living at the site. (The real Vilcabamba is now believed to have been built in the jungle about 50 miles west of Machu Picchu.) Recent research has cast doubt on whether Machu Picchu had ever been forgotten at all. 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. Over time it became famous as the legendary Lost City of the Inca.
This was a hidden capital to which the Inca had escaped after the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532. When the explorer Hiram Bingham III encountered Machu Picchu in 1911, he was looking for a different city, known as Vilcabamba. It’s not actually the Lost City of the Inca. While the archaeological site draws scores of visitors to Peru annually, here are 10 lesser known secrets hidden beneath its layers of history.
Nestled high in the slopes of the Andes, the ruins of Machu Picchu continue to reveal the mysteries of the Inca Empire.
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