An Inca estate on a ridge between two peaks, abandoned within a century of being built and never found by the Spanish. Now ticketed by circuit, by hour, and capped.
What it actually is
Not a city and not a lost one. Machu Picchu was a royal estate, built for the Inca ruler Pachacuti around 1450, occupied by perhaps 750 people at its height, and abandoned about a hundred years later around the time of the Spanish conquest. The Spanish never found it, which is why it survived intact when almost every other major Inca site was dismantled for its stone.
Local farmers knew perfectly well it was there. Hiram Bingham, the Yale historian usually credited with the 1911 “discovery”, was taken up by an eleven-year-old boy whose family were farming the terraces.
The construction is the thing that lands in person. The walls of the Temple of the Sun and the Room of the Three Windows are ashlar masonry: granite blocks cut so precisely that they hold without mortar and have survived five centuries of earthquakes on a seismic ridge. There is no mortar because there did not need to be.
The ticketing, which is the hard part
Entry is capped and sold as timed tickets on numbered circuits, and this is where most people go wrong. Each circuit is a fixed one-way route through a specific part of the site — the panoramic terraces, the urban sector, the lower ruins — and you cannot switch, backtrack or wander.
The circuits that include the classic postcard viewpoint are not the ones that take you through the main ruins. If you want both you need to choose carefully, and the details are revised regularly, so read the current circuit descriptions on the official site before buying rather than relying on any blog, including this one.
Add-on climbs are separate, capped and sold out far in advance: Huayna Picchu, the steep peak behind the site, and Machu Picchu Mountain, longer and less exposed.
Buy from the official government site. Everything else is a reseller with a markup.
Getting there
There is no road to Aguas Calientes, the town below the site. You arrive by train from Cusco, Poroy or Ollantaytambo — a spectacular journey along the Urubamba, run by two operators, and expensive by Peruvian standards. Book ahead in the dry season.
From Aguas Calientes it is a 25-minute shuttle bus up the switchbacks or a 90-minute walk up a steep stone staircase.
The alternative is walking in on the Inca Trail, which is capped at 500 people a day including porters, requires a licensed operator, books out around six months ahead, and closes every February for maintenance.
Altitude and timing
Machu Picchu is at 2,430m, which is lower than Cusco at 3,400m. The mistake is flying into Cusco and going straight up. Spend two nights in the Sacred Valley — Ollantaytambo or Urubamba, both around 2,800m — before you attempt anything.
Dry season is April to October and is when the views exist. November to March is wet, green, cheaper and frequently cloudy; a whole visit can be spent inside a cloud.
Early entry gives you the best chance of the site before the cloud burns off, and the first buses queue from before dawn.
More Ancient Wonders
Petra
A Nabataean trading capital carved into rose sandstone, entered through a kilometre-long crack in a cliff. Far larger than the one facade everyone photographs.
Angkor
The capital of the Khmer Empire, a thousand square kilometres of temples and hydraulic engineering in the jungle, of which Angkor Wat is one building.
The Pyramids of Giza
The only survivor of the seven wonders of the ancient world, on the edge of a city of twenty million, and about 4,500 years old.