Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu

This guide to the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, above Aguas Calientes in Peru, opens on a cold, drizzling morning in July 1911, as a local guide named Melchor Arteaga leads a Yale professor, Hiram Bingham, across the Urubamba on a bridge of four lashed logs. Bingham had come hunting a different lost city, Vilcabamba, and only climbed this peak after Arteaga mentioned ruins almost in passing. At the top he found no empty ruin but a farming family already living among the stones, whose children showed him around a citadel raised under the emperor Pachacuti roughly four hundred sixty years earlier. Listen as you look toward the highest terrace, where the Inca's sacred stonework still waits.