Built around 1450 to 1470 under Pachacuti at 2,430 metres on a ridge in the Eastern Cordillera, and abandoned somewhere between 1532 and 1565, not because the Spanish took it but because the empire it belonged to was collapsing from conquest and disease. They never found it. It was too remote, the jungle closed over it, and only people in the immediate valleys knew it was there. Hiram Bingham brought it to the world on 24 July 1911, but he was not first: the Peruvian Agustín Lizárraga had been there in 1902 and left his name and the date written at the Temple of the Three Windows. National sanctuary in 1981, UNESCO in 1983. It is now capped at 4,500 visitors a day, up to 5,600 in peak season, on timed circuits, and it took over 1.5 million people in 2025. Book months ahead. 80 km northwest of Cusco.
Cusco Region, Peru
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