Machupicchu Botanical Garden

This guide to the Machupicchu Botanical Garden in Aguas Calientes traces the 2005 fencing-off of a half-hectare plot against a black-market orchid trade that has stripped these cloud forests for over a century. It follows the archaeologist Chávez Ballón's decades-long push to build the garden, first proposed in 1970, and the illegal collectors who still target Peru's wild orchids today. Numbered plants and sixteen interpretive panels catalogue the birds, butterflies and amphibians sharing this patch of forest.