"Suddenly I was standing in front of the walls of a ruin and houses from the best quality of Inca building art. The walls were difficult to see because the trees and moss ranked partly the stones during centuries. But in the shade of bamboo bushes and climbing plants were the walls visible of white granite blocks chopped in the highest precision. I found brilliant temples, royal houses, a big square and tens of houses. It looked like a dream."
The discovery of Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham

With ten life zones ranging from low montane dry forest to the snowline, the ecology of the sanctuary of Machu Picchu is highly diverse and complex. In terms of altitude, it extends from 1,725 metres at the level of the river to 6,271 metres on the peak of snow-clad Salkantay. These features, together with the singular topography, give rise to very diverse wild flora and fauna. Orchids are the most striking species among the characteristic flora, with over thirty genera and about 100 recorded species. The endangered spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) stands out among the vertebrate fauna.

It was in this landscape that the Incas built Machu Picchu at the end of the fourteenth century, and the city was still functioning in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Inca people were the last and best known of the advanced societies of the Andes before the arrival of the Europeans. They created an empire that covered a broad territory in which today’s republics of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, part of Argentina and perhaps the southern end of Colombia are now located. The success of this empire, and that of the Andean societies that preceded it, was mainly due to intelligent management of natural resources and to intentional transformation of the landscape, converting what had been arid lands into fertile areas under intensive production. Machu Picchu is a clear illustration of this, and for that reason it is now perhaps the most famous Inca site.

The ruins of Machu Picchu, rediscovered on 24 July 1911 by Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham III (1875-1956). While the Inca people utilized the Andean mountain top, erecting massive stone structures from the early 1400’s, legends and myths indicate that Machu Picchu (meaning ‘Old Peak’ in the Quechua language) was revered as a sacred place from a far earlier time.

In his book “The discovery of Machu Picchu” he later wrote: “Suddenly I was standing in front of the walls of a ruin and houses from the best quality of Inca building art. The walls were difficult to see because the trees and moss ranked partly the stones during centuries. But in the shade of bamboo bushes and climbing plants were the walls visible of white granite blocks chopped in the highest precision. I found brilliant temples, royal houses, a big square and tens of houses. It looked like a dream.”

Invisible from below and completely self-contained, surrounded by agricultural terraces sufficient to feed the population, and watered by natural springs, Machu Picchu seems to have been utilized by the Inca as a secret ceremonial city. Two thousand feet above the rumbling Urubamba river, the cloud shrouded ruins have palaces, baths, temples, storage rooms and some 150 houses, all in a remarkable state of preservation. These structures, carved from the grey granite of the mountain top are wonders of both architectural and aesthetic genius. Many of the building blocks weigh 50 tons or more yet they are sculpted so precisely and fitted together with such exactitude that the mortarless joints will not permit the insertion of even a thin knife blade. Little is known of the social or religious use of the site, yet the skeletal remains of ten females to one male suggests that it may have been a sanctuary for the training of priestesses and/or brides for the Inca nobility.

Hiram Bingham was taken to the spot by Melchior Arteaga, a local farmer, and accompanied by Sergeant Carrasco, a guard commissioned by the Cuzco authorities to assist him. In fact, Bingham wanted to discover Vilcabamba, another of the lost cities of the Incas. He had references from sixteenth century Spanish chronicles, as it was there that Manco Inca -the last native sovereign - took refuge at the time of the Spanish conquest. Bingham must have been absolutely astonished to find intact under a layer of vegetation a city that had gone unnoticed ever since it had been abandoned 400 years earlier.

Machu Picchu is some 100 kilometres from the city of Cuzco, the capital of the empire. It is a small city built entirely of blocks of quarried stone on the ridge of one of the foothills of the Andes formed by a huge meander of the River Urubamba. The city perches saddle-like atop the slopes. The location of the site is noteworthy, particularly since the way the architecture blends into the scenic beauty of the surrounding area lends it a very special quality.

Machu Picchu was most likely a royal estate and religious retreat. It was built between 1460 and 1470 AD by Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, an Incan ruler. Machu Picchu is comprised of approximately 200 buildings, most being residences, although there are temples, storage structures and other public buildings. It has polygonal masonry, characteristic of the late Inca period.

About 1,200 people lived in and around Machu Picchu, most of them women, children, and priests. The buildings are thought to have been planned and built under the supervision of professional Inca architects. Most of the structures are built of granite blocks cut with bronze or stone tools, and smoothed with sand. The blocks fit together perfectly without mortar, although none of the blocks are the same size and have many faces; some have as many as 30 corners. The joints are so tight that even the thinnest of knife blades can’t be forced between the stones.

Another unique thing about Machu Picchu is the integration of the architecture into the landscape. Existing stone formations were used in the construction of structures, sculptures are carved into the rock, water flows through cisterns and stone channels, and temples hang on steep precipices.

One of Machu Picchu’s primary functions was that of astronomical observatory. The Intihuatana stone (meaning ‘Hitching Post of the Sun’) has been shown to be a precise indicator of the date of the winter solstice and other significant celestial periods. Every midwinter, the Incas held a ceremony at this stone, in which they ‘tied the sun’ to halt its northward movement in the sky.

Shamanic legends say that when sensitive persons touch their foreheads to the stone, the Intihuatana opens one’s vision to the spirit world (the author had such an experience which is described in detail in chapter one). Intihuatana stones were the supremely sacred objects of the Inca people and were systematically searched for and destroyed by the Spaniards. When the Intihuatana stone was broken at an Inca shrine, the Inca believed that the deities of the place died or departed.

The Spaniards never found Machu Picchu, even though they suspected its existence, thus the Intihuatana stone and its resident spirits remain in their original position. The mountain top sanctuary fell into disuse and was abandoned some forty years after the Spanish took Cuzco in 1533. Supply lines linking the many Inca social centers were disrupted and the great empire came to an end.

In fact was Machu Picchu never desolated. Is it the city where the Spanish were looking for during ages, El Dorado? When the professor Hiram Bingham arrived he encountered some farmer families living there. They told him this was the perfect place for not paying any taxes or doing military service. Bingham also found some graffiti on some rocks scratched by former visitors who left their names. One of them was Antonio Raimondi, the Count of Sartiges and Charles Wiener. The names of the Santander brothers can still be seen at the lower parts of the Temple of the Sun (1909).

Tag: Machu Picchu, the Sacred City of the Old Mountain