Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu
Fifteenth-century Inca royal estate and sacred citadel of stone terraces perched high above a cloud-forest river gorge.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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