CUSCO is the result of the superimposition of one culture upon another. Nestled in the heart of the Andes, Cusco was the political and religious capital of the Incas, the hub of the greatest empire ever seen in the Americas and a place of pilgrimage for all those who worshipped the sun god, Inti. With the arrival of the Spanish in 1532, Cusco's temples and palaces became the foundations for magnificent neo-Baroque churches, and above its narrow streets appeared the wooden balconies of red-roofed colonial houses.
Cusco’s landscape is one of dramatic contrasts, where high mountain ranges combine with barren plains, rolling hills, deep valleys and lowland tropical forest, where Peru's finest natural reserves are among the most biodiverse regions on Earth. . |
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MACHU PICCHU is located beyond the Sacred Valley of the Incas, where the Urubamba River leaves the highlands to rush down into the cloud forest. This 15th century city lies amid a verdant tropical landscape crisscrossed by a network of Inca highways, where it lay hidden from the world for four centuries until it was discovered in 1911. Reached by hikers along the world-famous Inca Trail or via a spectacular railway journey from Cusco, Machu Picchu has lost none of its mystery in the more than ninety years since its discovery.
Machu Picchu, the so-called "Lost City of the Incas", remains intact because it was never discovered by the invading Spanish. Constructed on a high, forested mountain overlooking the Urubamba River, Machu Picchu and Wayna Picchu were lost in time and dense foliage until they were brought to the attention of the outside world in July 1911 by the American historian and explorer Hiram Bingham. |
