The inca city of Machu Picchu

The ruins of Machu Picchu, discovered in 1911 by archaeologist Hiram Bingham of Yale University, is one of the most beautiful historical places and enigmatic in the world. While the Inca people certainly used the Andean mountain top (9060 meters), the construction of hundreds of stone structures from the early 1400's, legends and myths indicate that Machu Picchu ("Old Peak" which means Quechua language) was revered as a sacred place of a much earlier time. Whatever its origin, the Inca turned the site into a small village (5 square miles) but extraordinary. Invisible from below and completely independent, surrounded by agricultural land sufficient to feed the population, and watered by natural springs, Machu Picchu seems to have been used by the Incas as a secret ceremonial city.

Two thousand feet above the roar of the Urubamba River, the cloud shrouded ruins have palaces, baths, temples, warehouses and nearly 150 houses, all in a remarkable state of preservation. These structures, carved in gray granite from the mountain top are wonders of engineering and architectural appearance. Many building blocks weighing 50 tons or more precisely, they are so sculpted and assembled so exactly that no mortar joints do not allow the inclusion of a knife, but thin. Little is known about the social or religious use of the site during Inca times. The remains of ten women a man had led to the hypothesis that the informal site may have been a sanctuary for the training of priests and / or wives of the Inca nobility. However, after examining the bones osteological revealed an equal number of male bones, indicating that Machu Picchu was not exclusively a temple or place of residence for women.

One of the main functions of Machu Picchu was as an astronomical observatory. Intihuatana stone (ie, "Changing Message of the sun") has proven to be an accurate indication of the date of the two equinoxes and other significant celestial periods. Intihuatana (also known as or saywa Sukhanka Stone) is designed to attack the sun for two equinoxes, not Solstice (as has been stated in some tourist literature and new age books). At noon on March 21 and September 21, the sun is almost directly above the pillar, creating no shadow at all. At this moment the sun "is found with all his strength, when the pillar" and is a moment "tied" is a rock. In these times, the Incas held ceremonies stone, where they are "connected with the sun" to halt its movement in northern sky.


There is also an alignment with the December solstice Intihuatana (summer solstice in the southern hemisphere), where at sunset the sun sinks behind Pumasillo (claw Puma), the most sacred mountain of the western Cordillera Vilcabamba, but the sanctuary is primarily equinoctial.

Posted in: Travel