Winay Wayna

This guide to Winay Wayna, along the trail above Aguas Calientes, opens with a puzzle: how a major Inca waystation just four kilometers from Machu Picchu stayed hidden for thirty years after Hiram Bingham's famous 1911 discovery, only properly studied in 1940 by explorer Paul Fejos and archaeologist Julio C. Tello. It follows the terraces, ritual baths and stone channels still carrying spring water down the slope, and the theory that pilgrims stopped here to purify themselves before continuing on to the Sun Gate. The guide sits with the irony of Bingham getting the headlines while this site got decades of silence and an orchid for a name.