Machu Picchu, a compact Inca settlement on a ridge high above the Urubamba gorge, is the most recognised monument of the Andean world, and one whose function scholarship has substantially revised.
What it was
Built in the fifteenth century, most likely as a royal estate of the emperor Pachacuti, Machu Picchu combined residences, temples, storehouses and agricultural terraces in a spectacular natural setting ringed by peaks the Inca held sacred. It was never a "lost city" to the local people who farmed nearby, but it was unknown to the wider world until the American explorer Hiram Bingham was led to it in 1911; much of what he removed became the subject of a long repatriation dispute with Peru, resolved in the 2010s.
Sacred stone and sky
The site is dense with religious architecture. The Temple of the Sun, a curved tower over a carved rock, is aligned so that light strikes a window at the June solstice; the Intihuatana, a carved stone pillar, has long been read as a device connected with the sun, its name meaning roughly "hitching post of the sun". The Inca worked stone with extraordinary precision, fitting mortarless blocks so tightly that a blade cannot enter, and they incorporated living outcrops of the mountain into their shrines, treating the landscape itself, the peaks or apus and the river below, as sacred.
A living landscape and a strained one
The Andes remain home to living Quechua-speaking peoples whose relationship to the mountains and to figures such as Pachamama, the earth, continues; ritual offerings are still made in the region. Machu Picchu is a World Heritage site and the centrepiece of Peruvian tourism, which has brought pressure that the authorities manage through timed tickets and capped daily numbers to protect the fragile terraces and stonework.