Peru is known all over the world for Cuzco and Cuzco for Machu Picchu. Because of its incomparable beauty, its harmonious landscape and the spiritual strength it transmits, this Inca citadel has the privilege of making part of that chosen group of world class monuments that millions of people in the five continents dream of visiting.
In July 1911, an American scientific expedition led by Hiram Bingham arrived at the Urubamba river canyon, a warm and humid region of large vegetation. The majesty of a landscape combining distant glaciers and gigantic ravines that poured their waters into the quiet river amazed the expeditionary. Bingham was obsessed with discovering Tampu,Tocco, the mythical city of the first Incas reported by some chronicles. On July 24, after a difficult ascent to the mountain known by the place’s inhabitants as Machu Picchu (2.350 masl), Bingham discovered among the vegetation an extraordinary compound of ruins. The explorer thought he had found the lost capital of the Incas, without imagining that instead of solving a mystery he was unearthing another one that would last throughout the twentieth century. If that citadel with buildings as gorgeous as the most beautiful ones in Cuzco was not TampuTocco, what was it, then? Why did the chronicles fail to write about this marvel of Inca architecture? The powerlessness of science to answer these questions made the mystery grow even more and the most imaginative theories were proposed.
The territories where Machu Picchu is located were conquered by Inca Pachacutec, the ruler who had the merit of converting the small Incakingdom, which did not reach much beyond Cuzco, into a vast and powerful empire. Pachacutec ordered the construction of Machu Picchu as proof of his military exploits. Moreover, he had done likewise before when, younger, he conquered Pisaq and Ollantaytambo. Subsequently, remarkable Inca buildings were built there.
Pachacutec lived in the memory of his people not only as a wary conqueror, but also as a great constructor and as the ruler that reformed religion and organized the official ritual to their minutest details. This argument supports the theory that Machu Picchu was a place its creator deemed appropriate for the adoration of imperial gods. In fact, beside the finely finished buildings, suit-able for the residence of a ruler, there are many others presumably destined to religious functions. The place’s topography was characterized by rocky cone-shaped peaks, caverns, snow-capped mountains. It is located at a tight curve of an impressive canyon combining essential features for a religion that focuses on the relation-ship between man and nature.
Pachacutec likely visited the citadel of Machu Picchu sporadically. Apparently several families of royal lineage lived there, as well as priests and priestesses that adored the sun, the snowed-capped mountains (apus) and natural phenomena. The site’s dwellers did not exceed one or two thousand in number and lived off what was grown in the terraces surrounding the citadel and on the slopes of neighboring mountains, like Wiñay Wayna. When the Spanish conquest came about, a sacred place, which could only exist as part of a highly organized State, lost its reason for being. Not only the victorious gods had changed, but also the farmers and servants that fed the priests, who came from very far away lands, as it was usual in the Inca empire, felt the moment had arrived for them to return to their places of origin. On the other hand, it was natural for conquerors not to value a place like Machu Picchu: the Inca agricultural compounds, a prodigy of agricultural science and hydraulic engineering, interest them only as they felt safe, or close to large tribute paying populations. Thus, the sanctuary was swallowed by plants and oblivion which, paradoxically, permitted its conservation to present.
