Pachacuti’s ridge estate became a New Wonder above the Urubamba
Machu Picchu, a fifteenth-century Inca citadel at 2,430 metres in Peru’s Eastern Cordillera, sits about eighty kilometres northwest of Cusco above the Sacred Valley. Built around 1450 likely as emperor Pachacuti’s estate, it wears classic dry-stone walls, the Temple of the Sun, Three Windows, and Intihuatana stone.
The ruins occupy a narrow saddle between two peaks, Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu. In Quechua machu means old and wayna young, while pikchu means summit or peak, so the site’s name is usually rendered as old mountain. A 2021 study argued that the builders probably called the place Huayna Picchu, or simply Picchu, and that the modern name attached itself to the ruins through Hiram Bingham’s publications from 1911.
Its dating is debated. The older model, drawn from John H. Rowe’s reconstruction of Pachacuti’s reign, placed the start of building around 1450, a decade after he took power. A 2021 study led by Yale anthropologist Richard L. Burger, based on 26 radiocarbon dates from human remains, instead found occupation from about 1420 to 1530. Construction seems to span two rulers, Pachacutec and Túpac Inca Yupanqui.
Archaeologists broadly agree that Pachacutec ordered the estate after conquering the middle and lower Urubamba, as one of several royal estates along that river, and that the palace complex was a seasonal retreat. It would not have passed down the royal line. It was used for about eighty years and then abandoned, apparently because of the Spanish conquest elsewhere in the empire, and smallpox brought by travellers may have killed many residents before any conquistador arrived.
Local people always knew the ridge, even after outsiders dubbed it the Lost City of the Incas. Its mortarless walls, the Temple of the Sun, the Room of the Three Windows and the Intihuatana stone draw crowds. Peru made it a historic sanctuary in 1981, UNESCO listed it in 1983, and by 2025 more than 1.5 million people visited each year.
Source: Machu Picchu
