On a cold, wet July day in 1911, Hiram Bingham
rose early to climb a mountain.
A Yale lecturer, Bingham was in the Andes
to find Vilcabamba - the fabled lost city
of the Incas.
But now he was taking a detour, chasing stories
of a nearby peak with ruins to rival the Pyramids.
As he shivered in the rain, Bingham must’ve
wondered if these tales were just the locals
playing a practical joke.
What sort of culture could build something
all the way up here?
How would it even have been possible for a
civilization that died out in the 16th Century?
But if these doubts ever crossed Bingham’s
mind, they would soon be swept away.
At the top of that mountain lay the best-preserved
set of ruins in the whole of the Americas:
Machu Picchu.
In the century since Bingham’s discovery,
Machu Picchu has remained a source of intense
fascination.
A vast Inca complex, it has graced the front
of enough postcards, travel books, and annoying
Instagram feeds to almost lose its magic.
Yet even amid such popularity, the real story
of Machu Picchu remains mostly unknown.
Today, Geographics is digging deep into the
layers of mystery surrounding Peru’s sacred
site, and uncovering the tale of South America’s
greatest ruin.
The Lost City
Slightly over 70km outside the ancient Peruvian
city of Cuzco lies a mountain with a secret.
Well, actually, it’s not much of a secret.
Machu Picchu is no longer a mist-shrouded
fantasy ruin, but a well-established tourist
spot that gets over 1.5 million visitors a
year.
Anyway, back to the story.
At the top of this secret, totally-undiscovered
mountain, sits a great ruin: the fabled Lost
City of the Incas.
At least, that’s what everyone thinks.
In reality, Machu Picchu was never a city,
but likely a royal retreat for the Inca elite.
It was also probably never “lost” in the
traditional sense.
While Hiram Bingham did rediscover it for
the wider world, Peruvians had known of Machu
Picchu for centuries.
And this is something you just have to get
used to when talking about Machu Picchu.
So much of what we know about the site is
wrong, that learning about it is basically
a demolition derby for your romantic fantasies.
With that in mind, let’s go back and try
our opening again.
Slightly outside the trendy destination of
Cuzco lies an incredibly-famous mountain with
an over-touristed ruin.
Known as Machu Picchu, that not-so-secret
ruin is mistakenly believed by many to be
the Lost City of the Incas.
But while that not-secret not-city is sadly
not the Machu Picchu of your dreams, it is
still a site of major significance.
It was on this tour group-choked mountaintop
that one of the Americas’ greatest empires
reached its height.
The story starts back in the early 15th Century,
when the Inca empire exploded onto the scene.
And yes, that’s the 15th Century AD.
If your image of the New World’s empires
involves societies like the Maya standing
for millennia, then the Inca’s miniscule
lifespan can be something of a shock.
But make no mistake.
The Incas may have been short lived, but they
had very deep roots.
Their ancestors had been part of the Wari
Empire, which had collapsed back in 1100 AD.
When that empire fell, the Inca as we know
them had started to emerge around Cuzco, conquering
other groups and consolidating their power
on their region.
But it would take a great man to turn their
little provincial base into South America’s
next great empire.
In the early 1400s, that man, Pachacuti Inca
Yupanqui, was born.
It’s hard to say much about Pachacuti’s
life with certainty, because a lot of it is
shrouded in myth.
But the story goes that Pachacuti was in Cuzco
one day when a rival power known as the Chanca
attacked.
Unfortunately for Cuzco, the Inca ruler at
the time was a big proponent of “all for
one, and one for - just kidding.
I’ma run away now,” and fled, leaving
the city undefended.
Supposedly, the Sun God then sent Pachacuti
a sign that he should fight to protect the
city alone.
Then God transformed a bunch of rocks into
warriors, and the Inca defeated the Chanca.
Not long after, in 1438, the grateful Inca
made Pachacuti their new ruler.
It’s at this moment that the Inca Empire
was born.
Barely was the throne warm beneath his imperial
backside than Pachacuti was off doing some
attacking of his own.
Over the next few years, Pachacuti led the
Inca outside their Cuzco home for the first
time.
He conquered the Huantanay Valley; swept down
into the Lake Titicaca Basin and overthrew
the rulers there.
By the time he was done, the Inca were the
new kids on the block, in charge of an empire
in rude health.
It wouldn’t be long before that healthy
new empire became a sprawling monster.
The Lost Kingdom
One translation of Pachacuti’s royal title
is “Earth Shaker,” and it’s certainly
true that he shook things up for the Andean
kingdoms.
When the Inca came in and took over your territory,
it meant paying tribute.
Since not every culture could pay in goods,
tribute often took the form of backbreaking
labor.
Under Pachacuti’s watch, conquered peoples
built a vast network of roads linking up his
new empire.
They constructed grain storage houses, allowing
the empire’s many regions to build food
surpluses and ride out droughts and floods
- a perennial problem in the Andes.
But while not starving to death was kind of
a bonus, most of Pachacuti’s new subjects
loathed his empire.
The Inca believed they had the divine right
to rule over everyone.
Non-Inca were given no path to citizenship
in their state, resulting in an unbalanced
situation where a mere 40,000 Inca wound up
ruling over first hundreds of thousands, then
millions of others.
But what could these guys do?
Pachacuti was a fearsome warrior in charge
of a fearsome army.
He was also a master at empire building.
At some point, Pachacuti handed over the task
of conquering new provinces to his son, and
returned to Cuzco to shore up his power.
He did this using two important materials:
stone, and rope.
Let’s tackle the latter first.
You may have heard that the Inca never developed
a written language.
While that’s true, it doesn’t mean that
all the empire’s records had to be memorized
like lines in some horrendously complex play.
Instead, the Inca developed something called
Khipu.
At their most basic, Khipu are cords with
other ropes tied to them - which may have
smaller ropes tied to them - all with additional
knots running up and down each piece.
Like an abacus, this deceptively-simple rope
system could encode all sorts of complex financial
information, and possibly even stories and
myths.
Today, the knowledge for reading Khipu has
been lost, but we do know that they helped
Pachacuti organize his growing state.
They even allowed him to hire the 15th Century
equivalent of handsome YouTube historians
to record the tale of the empire’s rise
in rope.
But kingdoms are built on more than just good
record-keeping.
If Pachacuti wanted the common man to know
he was boss, he was gonna have to brag in
a medium more durable than string.
Pachacuti’s great construction projects
began not long after he returned to Cuzco.
The first stage was to raze almost all the
earthen buildings to the ground.
The second was to rebuild the temples and
palaces, but this time in stone.
The new Cuzco that sprang from the ruins would’ve
been unlike anything Andeans had ever seen.
Without iron tools, Inca craftsmen perfectly
carved vast granite blocks so they could slot
together, leaving so little space that you
couldn’t even slip a Khipu between them.
If you think that’s cool, you should know
the Inca also used dry stone walling, so these
giganto blocks didn’t even have any mortar
holding them in place.
That’s because Peru is earthquake country,
and walls held up with mortar tend to fall
on loyal taxpayers during tremors, while dry
walls just wobble like ten-ton jello before
settling back into place.
By the time Cuzco was finished it had transformed
from a small settlement in the Andes into
a capital radiating power.
Imagine how it’d feel for someone who’d
only ever known life in a mud hut to suddenly
be dropped at the foot of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
That’s how the conquered peoples who saw
Pachacuti’s Cuzco must’ve felt.
But the new Cuzco wasn’t even Pachacuti’s
greatest engineering feat.
That honor would fall to
Machu Picchu.
Building the Dream
When you picture Machu Picchu, you probably
picture gray stone buildings sat atop rising
terraces.
But it’s not what’s visible that makes
Pachacuti’s royal retreat such an engineering
marvel.
It’s all the stuff you can’t see.
Work probably began around 1450, a time when
Europe was busy with the Hundred Years’
War and the imminent fall of Constantinople.
But work beginning isn’t the same as construction
starting.
Machu Picchu is located 2,350 metres above
sea level, and spreads over 8km between several
mountain peaks.
You can’t just turn up and start building
stuff.
Instead, what likely happened is that the
Inca spent a year or two just studying water.
Machu Picchu is supplied by two rain-fed springs
situated 800m from the first of its fountains.
Evidently, the Inca knew how to utilize them,
because the canal feeding their terraces is
precisely calibrated for the springs’ flow.
In other words, the beginning of Machu Picchu
was less a grand construction project than
it was some dude sat with his Khipu, monotonously
recording waterflow.
That done, the real work could begin.
Along with writing and iron tools, one of
the things the Inca failed to invent was the
wheel.
So when they started deforesting the mountaintop
and carving out the rock, it would’ve been
without any of the tools that would make such
work even remotely bearable.
Still, the Inca were helped by the fact that
they didn’t need to cart all that dug up,
broken rock off down the mountainside.
Instead, they recycled it into the complex’s
foundations.
Machu Picchu is a pretty wet place.
It gets over 1,800mm of rain a year - about
three times as much as London, or twice as
much as Chicago, two cities almost synonymous
with staring listlessly out the window and
wondering why you don’t live somewhere drier.
But while rain in London means wet shoes and
grumpy commuters, rain at Machu Picchu could
potentially mean something much worse: landslides.
To combat this, and stop Pachacuti’s retreat
from simply sliding off down the mountainside,
the Inca were forced to think very hard about
Machu Picchu’s foundations.
The result is a huge layer of waste rock hidden
from view, through which excess water can
easily filter.
Above that is a layer of gravel, then gravel
mixed with soil, before you finally get to
the fertile topsoil.
It may sound slightly dull, but we’ve read
a few sources argue this is the real genius
of Machu Picchu.
A water management system so far ahead of
other Andean cultures that to compare them
would be like comparing the Hoover Dam to
something knocked up by a gang of drunken
beavers.
Of course, there’s more to Machu Picchu
than just good water management.
The cutting of the stone building blocks was
a monumental achievement in and of itself.
Made of granite, they were bigger than a man.
They were also pure white.
Just like with the Pyramids, what you see
of Machu Picchu now is a faded version of
what it looked like in its heyday.
But, hey, a faded version of architectural
magnificence is still pretty magnificent,
and it’s not like we can’t imagine how
it must’ve looked.
By the time Machu Picchu was finished, it
had room for nearly a thousand people.
There were residential areas and farming districts.
Religious buildings and palaces, all built
high up in the sky; a city in the mountains.
It was the single greatest site south of Guatemala’s
Mayan ruins.
Possibly the single greatest site in the whole
of the Americas.
And it was already doomed.
The Dying Empire
In 1471, Pachacuti finally kicked the bucket.
He left behind a decree that his subjects
should mourn for a year, and that 2,000 llamas
should be sacrificed to honor his passing.
More disturbingly, the sacrificing didn’t
stop at llamas, and a whole bunch of children
were also sent to meet their maker.
Still, Pachacuti’s passing didn’t mean
the passing of his empire.
In the aftermath of the emperor’s death,
his son, Tupac Inca Yupanqui, rose to the
throne.
By the time Tupac died, in 1493, the Inca
Empire had doubled in size.
Unbelievably, this was just the warm-up act.
Over the next 35 years, the Inca Empire underwent
a process of phenomenal expansion.
In Pachacuti’s day, it stretched from modern
Quito in Ecuador all the way down to Lake
Titicaca - a distance of 2,000km.
By 1528, it stretched almost as far as modern
Santiago in Chile, an additional 1,800km south.
To put that in perspective, if you laid the
Inca Empire across the continental US, it
would almost reach from New York City to LA.
At that precise moment, the Inca Empire was
likely the largest contiguous empire on the
face of the Earth, spanning 12 million people
speaking 30-odd languages.
Sadly, 1528 was also the precise moment the
empire’s fate was sealed.
It started with an unwanted incursion.
At some point, a sick traveler arrived in
the Incas’ lands, bearing the scars of a
disease the Andean cultures had never seen
before.
That disease was smallpox, brought over by
European colonists.
And it would devastate the Inca.
In Europe, smallpox was a scourge that killed
up to 30% of its victims.
In the Americas, though, it was like an immune
system wildfire.
Unexposed to anything remotely like it before,
Andean peoples fell in droves.
Up to 90% of Inca who contracted the illness
died.
It’s even thought smallpox was what caused
Machu Picchu to be abandoned, likely after
an outbreak devastated the retreat.
Yet smallpox alone wasn’t enough to bring
the empire crashing down.
That would require the work of two very different
men.
The first of these was a guy called Atahualpa.
An Inca prince, Atahualpa had watched as his
father - the empire's ruler - was carried
off by smallpox.
But when his brother had assumed the throne,
Atahualpa had decided the empire should be
his.
The resulting civil war had brought the empire
to its knees.
Kicking off in 1528, it strained the bonds
holding the empire’s peoples together almost
to breaking point.
By the time Atahualpa won in 1532, the empire
was a broken wreck just one good shove away
from collapsing completely.
Let’s meet the guy who gave it that shove.
Empire’s End
The Empire’s end came courtesy of Francisco
Pizarro.
A failed conquistador, Pizarro was a Spanish
nobody who’d made multiple trips to the
New World, but failed to find any gold.
In 1528, he’d been sailing down South America’s
Pacific Coast, on the brink of giving up.
But since 1528 is apparently the year everything
that could possibly go wrong for the Inca
went wrong, Pizarro didn’t give up.
Instead, he captured a boat loaded with treasure.
Convinced he’d hit the jackpot, Pizarro
decided to conquer the empire that boat had
come from.
When Pizarro launched his invasion of the
Inca empire in 1532, it should’ve been an
instant failure.
Pizarro had a mere 260 men to his name.
When he first met Atahualpa, on November 16,
1532, the Inca emperor was so unimpressed
with the Spaniards that he didn’t even bother
to try fighting.
But Pizarro had something Atahualpa didn’t
have.
Well, three things: Horses, modern weaponry,
and a streak of cunning that could’ve been
surgically implanted straight from a fox.
The day after their initial meeting, Pizarro
arranged to meet Atahualpa again, this time
in the city square at Cajamarca.
Apparently never having heard of the concept
of a “trap”, Atahualpa didn’t take any
precautions.
He’d just won a massive civil war.
His army numbered in the tens of thousands.
What did he have to fear from a couple of
hundred Spaniards?
Cannons.
Cannons were what Atahualpa had to fear.
When Atahualpa entered Cajamarca, he was greeted
not by deferential Spaniards, but by a hail
of cannonfire.
As the Inca picked themselves off the ground,
the Spanish horsemen charged in, and… well,
you only need to look at the casualty statistics
to see what happened.
That day, some 7,000 Inca were killed by the
twin assault of cannons and cavalry.
The number of Spanish dead?
Zero.
Blessed with advanced weapons and tactics,
not a single Spaniard had died.
And that pretty much set the tone for the
rest of Pizarro’s invasion.
As the Spaniards swept across the empire,
rallying the Incas’ conquered subjects to
their cause, thousands upon thousands of Inca
were massacred.
Their cities were looted.
Their treasures melted down and destroyed.
By November 15, 1533, almost a year to the
day that Pizarro and Atahualpa first met,
the Spanish had reached Cuzco.
When the capital fell, it effectively ended
the Inca Empire.
Less than 100 years after Pachacuti had taken
a small kingdom and turned it into a superpower,
the Inca were no more.
While the remnants of their empire would fight
on, the war was already lost.
It’s estimated today that the triple blow
of smallpox, civil war, and Spanish invasion
killed 6 million people.
Among their number was Atahualpa.
After the Spanish took him prisoner, they
first ransomed him for the equivalent of $50m
in today’s money.
When his subjects paid up, they then strangled
the former emperor rather than set him free.
Still, at least karma prevailed.
8 years after sacking Cuzco, Pizarro himself
was assassinated by his fellow conquistadors.
As the Incas’ empire first fell into ruins,
memory of Machu Picchu faded.
Despite lying so close to Cuzco, it was never
once visited by the conquistadors.
Never vandalized as so many other Inca cities
were.
Eventually, the roads leading there were overgrown,
and the former royal retreat swallowed up
by the cloud forests.
And there it would remain, waiting to be rediscovered.
It would be one Hell of a wait.
Rediscovery
Well, we’re finally here.
The last, and perhaps the most controversial
section of our story.
Some fifteen minutes ago, we mentioned that
one of the major misconceptions about Machu
Picchu is that it was ever lost in the first
place.
While it certainly fell into disuse, it was
never entirely abandoned.
Come 1911, there were still a small number
of farmers living in the ruins, working the
terrace fields.
But even if you decide that being unknown
outside a handful of locals around Cuzco qualifies
as “lost”, it’s still not certain that
1911 was the date it was rediscovered.
We dropped Hiram Bingham’s expedition into
our cold open because he’s the guy who made
Machu Picchu famous, but he wasn’t the first
European to see it.
As early as 1881, it was almost certainly
visited by the German adventurer, Augusto
Berns, who may have made off with some of
its relics.
Yet, despite all this, Bingham’s still the
guy who brought this semi-forgotten site to
the outside world.
What’s remarkable is that it was almost
an accident.
Bingham had been funded by Yale to go and
find the fabled Lost City of the Incas, Vilcabamba;
a site now identified with Espiritu Pampa.
While in the Andes near Cuzco in summer, 1911,
he and his team happened to get talking to
a local farmer named Melchor Arteaga.
Arteaga mentioned there were ruins at the
top of a nearby mountain he called “Machu
Picchu,” and offered to send someone to
show Bingham.
Incredibly, the Americans nearly didn’t
go.
They were looking for Vilcabamba, which was
known to exist at lower altitudes, and thought
climbing the mountain would be a waste of
time.
On top of that, they suspected Arteaga was
talking up these ruins, that they’d probably
be super unimpressive, and that they’d all
get soaked climbing in the rain.
It was only after a whole lot of humming and
hawing that Bingham finally decided he would
go and investigate alone.
And that was how, on July 24, 1911, Bingham
came to be the first non-local to set eyes
on Machu Picchu in nearly 400 years.
In future accounts, Bingham would big up how
awesome it was to step above the clouds and
see this lost city, but at the time he didn’t
seem to think it was all that.
He simply snapped some photos and climbed
back down.
When he met up with his team, he barely mentioned
what he’d found, and they all set off again
for Vilcabamba.
It was only once Bingham had returned to the
States and started looking over his photos
that the discovery of Machu Picchu seems to
have sunk in.
From that moment on, Bingham would become
the ruins’ biggest cheerleader.
The real boost for Machu Picchu’s profile
came in 1912, when National Geographic funded
Bingham to return to the site and clear it
of cloud forest.
The resulting photos sparked a Machu Picchu
craze in America that’s never really faded.
It’s from this one issue of National Geographic
that we get our biggest misconceptions: that
Machu Picchu was the fabled Lost City; that
it may have been a home for sun-worshipping
virgins.
It’s also from this expedition that we got
what was for a long time Machu Picchu’s
biggest controversy.
When Bingham went back to Peru in both 1912
and 1914, he swiped a whole load of Machu
Picchu’s treasures for study at Yale.
Understandably worried, the Peruvian government
told him he could only borrow each item for
a maximum of 18 months.
Bingham said “sure”...
...and then stuck all the objects in Yale’s
Peabody Museum, where they remained for almost
100 years, until the Peruvian government finally
took the university to court.
Word of advice, everyone: if Hiram Bingham
ever asks to borrow your lawnmower, just say
“no.”
After Bingham’s rediscovery, word of Machu
Picchu continued to spread.
By the early 1980s, it was famous enough to
be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Since then, its story has been one of steadily
increasing tourist numbers, until you finally
get to the modern day, with its tales of tourists
streaking across the ruins, and the Peruvian
authorities wanting to build an airport right
next to this once-sacred site.
But while Machu Picchu may be going the way
of Venice or the Sistine Chapel, or any number
of sites suffering under the burden of overtourism,
it remains a remarkable place.
Here is one of the only places to survive
the Spanish conquest of the Americas intact.
One of just a handful of sites that weren’t
stripped of their treasures and smashed up
by the conquistadors.
It’s also one of the last traces we have
left of one of history’s great empires.
An empire that at its height could’ve rivaled
any in the Old World.
An empire that sadly fell almost before it
could even get started.
We may not know what treasures the Inca would’ve
been capable of building had they not been
wiped out after a mere century.
But it almost doesn’t matter, because nothing
they could’ve built would rival what they
left behind.
Machu Picchu may be suffering from over tourism
and encroaching development.
But it still remains one of the world’s
marvels.
A reminder of a people, and an empire, now
long since lost
to history.