Intipata

This guide to Intipata above Aguas Calientes follows a slope terraced by the Incas into what looks, from below, like a staircase built for a god, part of a royal estate most archaeologists tie to the emperor Pachacuti. It traces four centuries in which Quechua farming families kept working these slopes after the Inca state collapsed, the 1911 arrival of the American explorer Hiram Bingham led there by local guides, and the terraces' rediscovery under brush by Cusco archaeologists in 1992. Potatoes, maize, oca and coca once grew across these same rows to feed a royal estate answering to nobody's market.