Machu Picchu :

A lost city, floating in the clouds. A Shangri-la of stones, set in the mountains of the Peruvian Andes. A mysterious city built, occupied and abandoned by the Incas in less than a century. This is Machu Picchu.

For hundreds of years, the city was hidden in the forest. Then in 1911, a Yale professor named Hiram Bingham organized an expedition to the Peruvian Andes. In the valley of the Urubamba River, he met a farmer who guided him to the ruins of hidden city – the only Inca city that had not been looted or destroyed during the previous four centuries.

When you see the exquisite cut in stone buildings, Bingham believed he had discovered Vilcabamba, the legendary final refuge of the Incas. Archaeological evidence, however, showed no: Machu Picchu seems to have been the center of a region of considerable size. According to recent evidence, the city may have been built by Pachacuti, the founding father of the Inca empire, and populated by his royal house. If this assumption is correct, Machu Picchu would have been built shortly before 1438, when Pachacuti completely expelled invading enemies and the Incas began to expand his empire.

Machu Picchu sits atop a mountain, among other peaks with forests. The city has only 200 houses, which suggests a population of about a thousand people. As the agricultural land nearby could feed many more people than that, some archaeologists say the city’s role was to grow coca leaves and take them to the priests and nobles of the nearby Inca capital, Cuzco call.

There is another theory, however, that seems to come closer to revealing the mysterious purpose of Machu Picchu: It would have been a spiritual and ceremonial center. The city contains many religious buildings, constructed carefully. One of them, the Temple of the Sun (a semi-circular tower with an extraordinary stonework), functioned as an observatory of the heavens. A mark made in the center tower is aligned through a window, with the exact spot where the sun rises in the June solstice. Inside the temples, the Incas placed statues or religious offerings.

Another small cave at Machu Picchu served as an observatory at the December solstice. Baths religious may have been made in the sources, a series of 16 small waterfalls where the focus could have been water, but the main sanctuary of Machu Picchu was probably the intihuatana – the “place to tie the sun” – a stone that the Incas may have used to observe the heavens and marking the seasons. Every city had such an Inca stone, but this was only saved from destruction by the Spanish conquerors, which eliminated all signs of idolatry Inca. Nobody knows for sure how this stone was used.

In another part of town, the Sacred Stone is a flat stone, upright, whose banks draw an outline of the mountains that can see beyond. Its function remains a mystery. In the Temple of the Condor, artists Incas carved on a stone image of a condor, again for reasons unknown.

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