Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu is a fifteenth-century Inca settlement on a mountain saddle about 2,430 metres above sea level in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru, some 80 kilometres north-west of Cusco. Perched above a loop of the Urubamba River, it is generally thought to have been a royal estate of the Inca ruler Pachacuti, though no written record from the period says so. Abandoned around the time of the Spanish conquest, it escaped the destruction suffered by many Inca sites and has become the best-known monument of the Inca Empire.

The dating of the site is still argued over. An older chronology, built on the historian John Rowe's reconstruction of Pachacuti's reign, put the start of building around 1450. A 2021 study led by Richard Burger of Yale, using 26 radiocarbon dates from human remains, concluded that people lived there from about 1420 to 1530, and other radiocarbon work points in the same direction. Construction seems to span the reigns of Pachacuti and his son Túpac Inca Yupanqui.

Most archaeologists agree that Pachacuti ordered the estate after conquering the middle and lower Urubamba valley, as one of several royal properties along the river, and that it served as a seasonal retreat. Around 750 people may have lived there, most of them permanent retainers. Skeletal and genetic studies show that these servants came from many regions, including the coast, the Amazon and what is now Ecuador. Roughly 200 buildings stand on terraces around a central square, divided into an upper and a lower town, with farming terraces to the south-east. The finest structures, the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Three Windows and the carved Intihuatana stone, are built of granite blocks fitted together without mortar, a technique suited to a site that sits on active fault lines. The terraces could not feed the whole population, so much food was brought in from the surrounding valleys.

The settlement was used for only about 80 years. It seems to have been abandoned in the mid-sixteenth century, during the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, probably because Inca rule collapsed and European diseases spread; smallpox may have killed many inhabitants before Spaniards ever reached the area. Late sixteenth-century Spanish documents mention local people returning to a place called Huayna Picchu, which may have been the site's original name, and over the following centuries forest covered the ruins, known only to people living nearby.

The German engineer Augusto Berns may have visited and plundered the site in the late nineteenth century, and maps mention Machu Picchu from 1874. In 1902 the Peruvian explorer Agustín Lizárraga reached the ruins and wrote his name and the date in charcoal in the Temple of the Three Windows. In July 1911 the American historian Hiram Bingham, searching for the last Inca refuge of Vilcabamba, was guided there by a farmer, Melchor Arteaga, and found Quechua families farming the old terraces. Bingham noted Lizárraga's inscription but later presented himself as the discoverer. His publications brought the site world fame and probably fixed the name Machu Picchu on the ruins.

Bingham returned with Yale University and the National Geographic Society in 1912, 1914 and 1915, clearing and excavating the site and shipping thousands of objects to Yale. The removal was legal under Peruvian law at the time but caused protests in Peru, and a long dispute followed. Yale agreed in 2010 to return the collection, and the last objects reached Cusco in 2012, where they are displayed in the Casa Concha museum.

Peru declared the surrounding area a Historic Sanctuary in 1981, and UNESCO listed Machu Picchu as a mixed cultural and natural World Heritage site in 1983, the protected landscape also sheltering spectacled bears and hundreds of bird species. Tourism is now the main threat. Visitor numbers passed 1.5 million in 2025, UNESCO considered placing the site on its danger list in 2017 over crowding, and plans for a cable car and hotels have repeatedly met opposition. The Ministry of Culture sets daily visitor limits, and floods in 2010, the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests of 2022–2023 all forced temporary closures.