In Depth

Endangered Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu survived the Spanish onslaught against the Inca Empire, but in the last few decades, it has suffered more threats to its architectural integrity and pristine Andean environment than it did in nearly 500 years of existence. UNESCO threatened first to add Machu Picchu to its list of endangered World Heritage Sites and not to withdraw that status unless stringent measures were taken by the Peruvian government to protect the landmark ruins.

In 2001, a film company shooting a TV ad for a Peruvian beer sneaked equipment into the site and irreparably damaged the stone Intihuatana atop the ruins (the camera crane operator was sentenced to 6 years in prison in 2005). Developers once planned to build cable cars that would run from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu to facilitate access. The plan, endorsed by the government, would have quadrupled the number of visitors and created an eyesore among the majestic peaks that surround the ruins. Fortunately, those ill-conceived plans were finally scuttled. Responding to the pressure from UNESCO, foreign governments, and watchdog groups, the Peruvian government also introduced measures to clean up the historic Inca Trail and restrict access to it. In a unique debt-swap initiative, the government of Finland traded 25% of Peru's outstanding debt (more than $6 million) for conservation programs.

The World Monuments Watch list of the 100 Most Endangered Sites in the World formerly included Machu Picchu, but in 2002, the site was removed from the notorious list in recognition of the government's more stringent regulations on the Inca Trail and the suspension of the cable-car plan.

We Call It Choclo: Foods of the Incas

Wondering what the Incas cultivated on all those amazing, steeply terraced fields that so elegantly grace the hillsides? Sure, they grew papas (potatoes) and coca (coca leaves), but corn was perhaps the Incas' most revered crop. Although corn was important throughout the Americas in pre-Columbian times, the Inca Empire raised it to the level of a sacred state crop. Corn was a symbol of power, and the Incas saved their very best lands for its cultivation. The choclo of Cusco and the Sacred Valley was considered the finest of the empire. It is still an uncommon delight: Huge, puffy, white kernels with a milky, sweet taste, it's best enjoyed in classic corn-on-the-cob style, boiled and served with a hunk of mountain cheese.

Pachamanca is a classic sierra dish perfected by the Incas. The word is derived from Pachamama, or "Mother Earth," in Quechua. A pachamanca is distinguished by its underground preparation. Several types of meat, along with potatoes, chopped ají (hot pepper), herbs, and cheese, are baked in a hole in the earth over hot stones. Banana leaves are placed between the layers of food. The act of cooking underground was symbolic for the Incas; they worshipped the earth, and to eat directly from it was a way of honoring Pachamama and giving thanks for her fertility. Peruvians still love to cook pachamancas in the countryside.

Quinoa, which comes from the word that means "moon" in Quechua (another central element in the Inca cosmology), was the favored grain of the Incas. The grain, which expands to four times its original volume when cooked and contains a greater quantity of protein than any other grain, remains central to the Andean diet. Most often seen in sopa a la criolla, it is often substituted for rice and incorporated into soups, salads, and puddings.

Not a Woman's World

For years, the world thought Machu Picchu had been almost entirely populated by the Inca's chosen "Virgins of the Sun." Bingham and his associates originally reported that more than three-quarters of the human remains found at the site were female. Those findings have been disproved, however; the sexual makeup of the inhabitants of Machu Picchu was no different than anywhere else in society: pretty much 50/50.

Bingham, the "Discoverer" of Machu Picchu

Hiram Bingham is credited with the "scientific discovery" of Machu Picchu, but, in fact, when he stumbled upon the ruins with the aid of a local campesino, he didn't know what he'd found. Bingham, an archaeologist and historian at Yale University (and later governor of Connecticut), had come to Peru to satisfy his curiosity about a fabled lost Inca city. He led an archaeological expedition to Peru in 1911, sponsored by Yale University and the National Geographical Society. Bingham was in search of Vilcabamba the Old, the final refuge of seditious Inca Manco Cápac and his sons, who retreated there after the siege of Cusco in 1537.

From Cusco, Bingham and his team set out for the jungle through the Urubamba Valley. The group came upon a major Inca site, which they named Patallacta (Llactapata), ruins near the start of the Inca Trail. A week into the expedition, at Mandorpampa, near today's Aguas Calientes, Bingham met Melchor Arteaga, a local farmer, who told Bingham of mysterious ruins high in the mountains on the other side of the river and offered to guide the expedition to them. In the rain, the two climbed the steep mountain. Despite his grandiose claims, the ruins were not totally overgrown; a small number of campesinos were farming among them.

In The Lost City of the Incas, Bingham writes: "I soon found myself before the ruined walls of buildings built with some of the finest stonework of the Incas. It was difficult to see them as they were partially covered over by trees and moss, the growth of centuries; but in the dense shadow, hiding in bamboo thickets and toggled vines, could be seen here and there walls of white granite ashlars most carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together . . . I was left truly breathless."

Bingham was convinced that he'd uncovered the rebel Inca's stronghold, Vilcabamba. Yet Vilcabamba was known to have been hastily built -- and Machu Picchu clearly was anything but -- and most accounts had it lying much deeper in the jungle. Moreover, the Spaniards were known to have ransacked Vilcabamba, and there is no evidence whatsoever of Machu Picchu having suffered an attack. Despite these contradictions, Bingham's pronouncement was accepted for more than 50 years. The very name should have been a dead giveaway: Vilcabamba means "Sacred Plain" in Quechua, hardly a description one would attach to Machu Picchu, nestled high in the mountains.

In 1964, the U.S. explorer Gene Savoy discovered what are now accepted as the true ruins of Vilcabamba, at Espíritu Pampa, a several-day trek into the jungle. Strangely enough, it seems certain that Hiram Bingham had once come across a small section of Vilcabamba, but he dismissed the ruins as minor.

The Machu Picchu ruins were excavated by a Bingham team in 1915. A railway from Cusco to Aguas Calientes, begun 2 years earlier, was finally completed in 1928. The road up the hillside to the ruins, inaugurated by Bingham himself, was completed in 1948. Bingham died still believing Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba, even though he'd actually uncovered something much greater -- and more mysterious.

Bingham took some 11,000 pictures of Machu Picchu on his second visit in 1912 and eventually removed more than 45,000 artifacts for study in the U.S. (with the permission of the Peruvian government under the agreement that they would be returned to Peru when there was a suitable place for their storage and continued study). Peru claims the agreement was for 18 months, but the objects have now been stored at Yale University's Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut (www.peabody.yale.edu/exhibits/machupicchu.html) for more than 90 years. A U.S. traveling exhibition was organized in 2003, but that seems only to have hardened the Peruvian government's contention that the collection constitutes national patrimony and demand that many of the Bingham artifacts be returned to Peru. Peru has threatened to sue Yale, but the Ivy League school so far has agreed to return only part of the collection and to help install and maintain those pieces in a Peruvian museum. Peru's Institute of National Culture hopes to build a Machu Picchu museum in Aguas Calientes, where the entire Bingham collection would be housed, in the near future.

On the Trail of "New" Inca Cities: The Discovery Continues

Since the demise of the Inca Empire, rumors, clues, and fabulous tales of a fabled lost Inca city stuffed with gold and silver have rippled across Peru. The tales prompted searches, discoveries, and, often, reevaluations. Machu Picchu wasn't the lost city Hiram Bingham thought it was -- Vilcabamba the Old was the last refuge of the Incas. The search continues, though, and incredibly, new discoveries continue to occur. First, it was Choquequirao in the 1990s. More recently, other teams have announced the discoveries of other lost Inca cities.

The discovery of Qorihuayrachina (also called Cerro Victoria, the name of the peak it rests on), 35km (22 miles) southwest of Machu Picchu in the Andes, was announced by the National Geographic Society in March 2002. Led by Peter Frost, a group of explorers uncovered the ruins of a large settlement that might have been occupied by the Incas long before they'd built a continent-spanning empire. Among the ruins are tombs and platforms, suggestive of an important burial site and sacred rites, although there are also indications that the site was an entire city. The ruins cover 6 sq. km (2 1/3 sq. miles) and occupy a spectacular mountaintop location with panoramic views of the Vilcabamba range's snowcapped peaks, which were considered sacred by the Incas. Archaeologists, claiming that Qorihuayrachina is one of the most important sites found in the Vilcabamba region since it was abandoned by the Incas nearly 500 years ago, have high hopes that the ruins will help them piece together the Inca Empire from beginning to end.

Frost claimed the site was the largest of its kind found since 1964. Comprising 100 structures, including circular homes, storehouses, cemeteries, funeral towers, roadways, waterworks, farming terraces, a dam, and a pyramid, the city might have been occupied by the Incas who fled Cusco after the Spanish conquest. The ruins are secluded in cloud forest in the remote Vilcabamba region.

Just months after the discovery of Qorihuayrachina in 2002, the British Royal Geographic Society, led by Hugh Thompson and Gary Ziegler, announced the finding of a major new Inca site, Cota Coca, only a few kilometers away but across a deep canyon from Choquequirao (a road might have connected the two). Wholly unknown to the outside world until its discovery, Cota Coca -- 97km (60 miles) west of Cusco -- appears to have been an administrative and storage center.

Llactapata, rediscovered by a U.S. and British team using remote (aerial) infrared technology and reported in November 2003, is the latest Inca city to surface. Just 3km (1 3/4 miles) from Machu Picchu, it, too, had been visited by Bingham and several explorers in the 1980s, so it's open to question how new its discovery is.

How long these discoveries might go on is anyone's guess. According to Hugh Thomson, "The physical geography of southeast Peru is so wild, with its deep canyons and dense vegetation, that it is possible that there are even more ruins waiting to be discovered. The fact that we have found two in 2 years means there could be many more out there."

Mudslides at Machu Picchu

In October 2005, an avalanche destroyed part of the train track leading from Cusco to Machu Picchu, stranding 1,400 tourists. Before that, in April 2004, two massive mudslides at the tail end of the rainy season hit Aguas Calientes, killing at least six local people and stranding as many as 1,500 tourists for the duration of Easter weekend. Seventy people were left homeless, and about 600 tourists had to be evacuated by helicopter. A portion of the railroad track that takes hundreds of thousands of tourists to the famed Inca ruins annually was damaged -- though normal rail service to and from Cusco reopened 2 days later -- as were a couple dozen homes near the river.

Though the heavy rains were unusual, they highlight both the dangers of traveling during the wet season as well as the precarious infrastructure of the town and its ill preparedness to handle the growth of tourism in recent years. The tragedies are likely to reignite calls in Peru to further limit the numbers of tourists permitted at Machu Picchu.