Montaña Machu Picchu

This guide climbs Montaña Machu Picchu, the peak towering over the citadel near Aguas Calientes, and opens with a puzzle no Inca document ever answers: why they built their greatest sanctuary on this exact spike of rock rather than the temple-carved peak across the valley. From roughly six hundred fifty meters up, it lays out the terraces and plazas below and the researcher Johan Reinhard's argument that the whole site was chosen for its mountains, water and horizon. It follows the Inca ruler Pachacuti's retreat back to July 1911, when a farmer named Melchor Arteaga guided the American Hiram Bingham up from the river, then handed him off to a young boy from the family already farming these slopes.