Machu Picchu is an Inca town strung along a ridge at 2,430 metres in the Peruvian Andes, and the reason there is anything left to look at is that the Spanish never found it. Everything else they reached they took apart. It was never lost either. Quechua families were farming the terraces when a local man named Melchor Arteaga led the American explorer Hiram Bingham up the ridge in 1911 for a small fee. Bingham was looking for somewhere else entirely, and his photographs made the place famous abroad. What he walked into is a town of granite cut to fit. The blocks in the temple walls lock together with no mortar and no gap you could slide a blade into. That is engineering, not decoration: in a tremor the stones jostle and drop back into place, where a mortared wall would have come down.
Most people come up by train, but the old road still works. The Inca Trail follows the original stone route for about four days over high passes and through cloud forest, past smaller Inca sites no train reaches, and brings you in on foot through the Sun Gate at first light. Inside, the climb to the Guardhouse terrace gives the view everyone has already seen: the whole town laid out below with the green cone of Huayna Picchu standing behind it. On an early entry the valley cloud often tears open while you are up there, uncovering the terraces a section at a time until the place seems to float. Huayna Picchu is a climb of its own, 260 metres in an hour on Inca stairs cut into the rock, with steel cable on the steepest steps and a short tunnel to squeeze through near the top. And running down through all of it is the water. The Incas cut a channel 749 metres from a spring on the mountainside and fed sixteen stone fountains in sequence, the first for the emperor and the last at the Temple of the Condor, each spilling into the next. The spring has never dried: the fault under the mountain keeps it coming.