Sun Gate

This guide to the Sun Gate, the last checkpoint on the Inca Trail before Machu Picchu comes into view near Aguas Calientes, opens with what the doorway was built for: not a monument but a guarded pass where sentries decided who could continue toward the sacred city below. It traces the gate to the emperor Pachacutec in the mid-1400s, and to the local farmer and son who led American historian Hiram Bingham through here in July 1911, while he was still hunting a different lost city. Around the June solstice, it explains, the rising sun lines up squarely with this plain stone frame. Stand in the doorway and look back the way the sentries once watched.