Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu is the most famous and best-preserved city of the Inka Empire: roughly 200 buildings, temples, terraces and fountains fitted together without mortar on a granite saddle 2,430 metres above the sea, between the peak of Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu. Built around AD 1450 as a royal estate attributed to the Inka Pachakuti, it was abandoned in the sixteenth century and hidden by cloud forest until Hiram Bingham reached it on 24 July 1911. Since then it has become a UNESCO World Heritage site (1983), one of the New Seven Wonders of the World (2007), the subject of a century-long dispute over the artifacts Bingham removed, and a laboratory for engineers and archaeologists studying Inka drainage, masonry and land use. This fact file gathers the evidence from UNESCO's World Heritage records, Peru's Ministry of Culture and the National Archaeological Park of Machu Picchu, Yale University, National Geographic, Britannica, Hiram Bingham's own 'Inca Land' and 1913 expedition report, and peer-reviewed research in Radiocarbon, Scientific Reports, NHESS and the Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering.