Machu Picchu: The 'Lost City' Where Farmers Were Already Living in 1911

On the morning of 24 July 1911, in a cold drizzle, three men crossed the Urubamba River on a bridge of thin logs and began to climb. One was Hiram Bingham, a lecturer in Latin American history at Yale. One was a Peruvian police sergeant named Carrasco. The third, leading the way, was Melchor Arteaga, a farmer who lived down by the river and had agreed, for a payment, to show them some ruins up on the ridge.

After a hard climb through the forest, they reached a grass hut. The people living there were not surprised to see visitors. They had been farming the old stone terraces on the mountain for years.

A ridge already lived on

The families, named in Bingham's account as Richarte and Álvarez, gave the travellers water and food. They told Bingham there were more ruins along the ridge. Arteaga stayed behind to talk, and a young boy from the household, usually named as Pablito, led Bingham and Carrasco on.

What Bingham saw over the next hours astonished him: terraces climbing the slopes, then granite buildings of the finest Inca masonry, half buried in trees and moss, with blocks cut to fit so tightly that no mortar was needed. He took photographs and made notes. On one wall of what he later called the Temple of the Three Windows, someone had written in charcoal: "A. Lizárraga 1902".

Agustín Lizárraga was a farmer from the valley who had visited with companions nine years earlier. Bingham noted the name in his journal. In his later books, however, he increasingly presented himself as the discoverer of a forgotten city.

What Bingham was looking for

Bingham had come to Peru with the Yale Peruvian Expedition to find Vilcabamba, the hidden stronghold where the last independent Inca rulers held out against the Spanish until 1572. In the weeks after Machu Picchu, he went on to reach the Inca site of Vitcos and a forest site called Espíritu Pampa.

He became convinced that Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba. He was wrong. Later explorers and archaeologists showed that Espíritu Pampa, which Bingham had seen and dismissed, matches the descriptions of Vilcabamba in Spanish records.

Making a site famous

In 1912, Bingham returned with support from Yale and the National Geographic Society. Workers cleared the vegetation, mapped the buildings and dug for burials. In April 1913, National Geographic published Bingham's photographs of Machu Picchu across a whole issue, and the image of a lost Inca city above the clouds went around the world. The fame helped Bingham's later career in politics: he became Governor of Connecticut and then a United States senator.

The expeditions of 1912, 1914 and 1915 shipped thousands of objects, including pottery, metalwork and human bones, to Yale. Peru said they had been lent; Yale treated them as its property. After decades of argument and a lawsuit, Yale agreed in 2010 to return them. They went back to Cusco in 2011 and 2012.

What Machu Picchu really was

Machu Picchu sits at about 2,430 metres on a saddle between two peaks, high above a loop of the Urubamba River. It has about 200 buildings arranged around a central plaza: temples, fine residences, storehouses and simpler houses for workers, all linked by stairways and surrounded by farming terraces.

Most archaeologists, drawing on 16th-century Spanish colonial documents, think it was a royal estate built for Pachacuti, the ruler who turned the Inca state into an empire in the 15th century. It was a country retreat for the royal family and nobles, not a fortress or a capital. Estimates suggest about 750 people lived there at its peak, most of them servants and craftsmen who kept the estate running. Far fewer stayed in the rainy season.

The date has moved recently. Spanish chronicles placed Pachacuti's rise in 1438, so the site was usually dated to around 1450. In 2021, a study led by Yale's Richard Burger used radiocarbon dating on human remains from the site and found it was occupied from about 1420, so the written chronology may be out by a couple of decades.

How it was built

The Inca had no iron tools and did not use the wheel for building. They shaped granite from the mountain itself with harder hammerstones and moved blocks with ramps, ropes and human labour. The most important buildings, such as the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Three Windows, use precisely fitted stones with no mortar. Ordinary buildings are rougher stonework bedded in clay.

Much of the effort is invisible. Engineers who have studied the site estimate that a large share of the construction lies underground, in foundations and deep layers of crushed stone that drain the heavy rains. A stone channel brought spring water down into a series of fountains.

What was it called?

Even the name is uncertain. Machu Picchu means "old peak", after the mountain above the site. In 2021, the historians Donato Amado Gonzales and Brian Bauer reviewed maps, Bingham's field notes and colonial documents and argued that the Inca town was probably known as Huayna Picchu, "young peak", or just Picchu. The official name has not changed.

Legend and evidence

Machu Picchu is still sold as a "lost city discovered" in 1911. The families farming its terraces, the boy who led Bingham to the temples and the name on the wall all say otherwise. The ruins had faded from the attention of the outside world, but not from the valley.

It is true that the Spanish left no record of sacking it, and that its remoteness helped protect it. It was probably abandoned around the time of the conquest, as the Inca state that supported it collapsed.

Machu Picchu today

Machu Picchu was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, for both its architecture and its mountain forests. It is Peru's most visited site, and the government limits daily ticket numbers and sets fixed routes to reduce wear on its paths and walls.

The artefacts that went to Yale are now on display in Cusco, at the Casa Concha museum. Visitors who look closely at the Temple of the Three Windows are standing where Bingham read a Peruvian's name, written nine years before his own arrival.

Bingham did not find Machu Picchu. He was taken there by people who already knew it, and his photographs then made it famous across the world.