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From Primedia Publications
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The Mysteries of Machu Picchu (cont.)

By Robert Allen

The Spanish conquistadors who destroyed the Inca civilization in the 1500s never saw Machu Picchu. Invisible from the river valley below, it escaped the slaughter and destruction the Spanish brought. But Machu Picchu's life as a city seems to have died out with the death of the civilization of which it was a part. Machu Picchu slept undisturbed for centuries, tucked away under a blanket of jungle, forgotten.

But a tenuous thread of memory clung to another Inca city, the legendary Vilcabamba, said to be a great city where the Incas had hidden a vast store of treasures. In search of Vilcabamba, a young American historian named Hiram Bingham set out in 1911 from Cuzco, once the center of Inca civilization and now one of Peru's principal cities. Though many explorers preceded Bingham, none had his good luck and timing. All the other expeditions from Cuzco had been forced to follow the arduous route farmers took over the Andes, going around the impassable canyon of the Urubamba to get to the lush Amazon piedmont. Bingham's route led down a new trail the Peruvian government had just blasted along the Urubamba River to open up commerce to the remote region.



Fifty miles northwest of Cuzco, Bingham met a farmer who knew of some ruins nearby. Bingham was mildly intrigued. The next day the man led Bingham 2,000 feet up a slippery, jungle-clad canyon wall to a couple of Quechuan natives farming maize on ancient stone Inca terraces at the top. While the men sat and chatted, a young boy bounded ahead to show Bingham the piles of stone blocks he used as a playground.

Though many explorers preceded Bingham, none had his good luck and timing.
The boy led him along a short path to what Bingham described in his book, Lost City of the Incas, as "a great flight of beautifully constructed stone-faced terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and ten feet high."

Bingham was unprepared for what followed. "Suddenly I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stonework. It was hard to see them for they were partly covered with trees and moss, the growth of centuries, but in the dense shadow, hiding in bamboo thickets and tangled vines, appeared here and there walls of white granite ashlars carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together."

Climbing up a series of steps to what is now called the Sacred Plaza, Bingham discovered two temples. "[T]he walls contained blocks of Cyclopean size, higher than a man. The sight held me spellbound . . . . I could scarcely believe my senses . . . . Would anyone believe what I had found?" Bingham was convinced he had found the lost city of Vilcabamba, and many believed him. Within a few decades of his startling discovery the canyon trail was replaced by a narrow-gauge railroad transporting an endless stream of tourists to Machu Picchu. The line is still in operation today, a mere four-hour excursion from Cuzco and the only way to Machu Picchu through the last two hours of roadless canyon.

In 1964, American explorer Gene Savoy discovered the real Vilcabamba in total decay at a far less impressive site northwest of Machu Picchu, but Machu Picchu persisted in the public's mind as the legendary lost city. Bingham had actually been at Vilcabamba after he left Machu Picchu but failed to recognize it.


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Bob Allen, a freelance journalist and author, frequently narrates the Surratt society's 12-hour bus tours of the escape route and is working on a book on John Wilkes Booth.