The City in the Clouds

In the summer of 1911, Hiram Bingham, a young American lecturer from Yale University, travelled to Peru with a single ambition. He wanted to find Vilcabamba, the last city where the Incas had resisted the Spanish conquerors. Somewhere in the steep, forested valleys above the Urubamba River, he believed, a lost Inca stronghold was waiting to be discovered.

On 23 July, his small expedition camped on a flat stretch of land by the river. There they met Melchor Arteaga, a local farmer who told them, through an interpreter, that there were impressive ruins on the mountain above. The ridge was called Machu Picchu, which means "old peak" in Quechua. The next morning was cold and drizzly, and Arteaga was in no hurry to climb. He agreed only after Bingham offered to pay him one sol, a generous sum for a single morning's work.

The climb was exhausting. Arteaga led the way, and a Peruvian police sergeant called Carrasco followed behind. Bingham crossed the river on a bridge of thin logs so fragile that he went over it on his hands and knees. On the other side, he scrambled up the slope through tangled undergrowth, much of the way on all fours. By midday, soaked with sweat and rain, the three men reached a small grass hut.

What they found there was not a deserted ruin. Two farming families, the Richartes and the Álvarezes, were living on the mountain and growing crops on the ancient stone terraces that the Incas had built centuries earlier. They offered the exhausted visitors cool water, and since Arteaga preferred to rest in the hut, a small boy from one of the families was sent to show the American the way.

Following the boy along the terraces, Bingham turned a corner and stopped. In front of him rose walls of white granite, cut so precisely that not even a knife blade could be pushed between the stones. There were temples, stairways, fountains and houses, half hidden under trees and vines. Machu Picchu, it is now believed, was built in the fifteenth century as a royal estate for the Inca ruler Pachacuti, and it was abandoned around the time of the Spanish conquest.

In 1913, an entire issue of National Geographic was devoted to the site, and Bingham became famous as the man who had found the "lost city of the Incas." It was not Vilcabamba, as later research showed. Nor had it ever really been lost. On one wall, Bingham himself had noticed a name written in charcoal: "Lizárraga 1902," left by a local farmer who had visited nine years before him. The city in the clouds had not been discovered that day. It had been shown to him by the people who already knew the way.