Built as a "royal estate" for the Inca emperor Pachacuti, Machu Picchu is an astounding and perennially mysterious archeological site. Perched high above a sinuous bend in the Urubamba River, Machu Picchu has lured explorers, poets and pilgrims to its mist-wreathed ridge top ever since its "discovery" by the American explorer Hiram Bingham in July, 1911.
No one lived here before the Incas. Those mighty empire builders from Cusco discovered this extraordinary place, finding it rich in natural features sacred to their religion. Both inspired and humbled by its dramatic natural beauty, their answer was to create on a vast scale one of the planet's most sensitive and harmonious works of art. The aesthetic genius of its layout and architecture coupled with the durability of its brilliant planning and engineering have given us today this finest of jewels among the UNESCO world heritage sites.
Scholars still argue about the meaning of Machu Picchu: why it was built and what purpose it served, who lived there and when they departed. Most agree that its main intent was spiritual and ceremonial. But clearly its creator, Pachacuti, intended the journey to his sacred city to be a powerful experience in its own right, a pilgrimage whose effort is stunningly rewarded time and again as one follows its winding way among peaks, forests, deep gorges and fairytale ruins.
GreenTracks Machu Picchu Tour Programs
HIKING THE INCA TRAIL
They celebrated the glory of the snow peaks by setting their trail along a ridge that descended from the sacred summit of Salcantay and ended at Machu Picchu. Wherever some astounding view or prominent natural feature captured their imaginations, they built magical stone outposts -- intricate ceremonial settlements of carved stone hewn from the white granite of the region. These cling to mountain spurs, perch on narrow ledges or spill down plunging slopes, with water channels threading among the houses, as though planted there, without human intervention, by an extravagant nature.
All this was abandoned around the time of the Spanish conquest, lying buried beneath the forest until Hiram Bingham set out in 1915 to follow up his discovery of Machu Picchu with a search for the Inca highway leading back to Cusco. Lucky explorer that he was, he found what we now call the Inca Trail and all the sites along it except Wiñay Wayna, that was not discovered until 1941, by Paul Fejos. Today we can hike this trail, seeing much of it intact and easy to imagine as it was in Inca times.
THE GOOD GUYS - The Prince's Rainforest Project
The Prince's Rainforests Project (PRP) was set up in 2007 by HRH The Prince of Wales following reports from leading climate change experts confirming the high level of carbon emissions caused by tropical deforestation, with the goal of “making the forests worth more alive than dead”.
The PRP's work has focused on two very specific aims. The first, to identify appropriate incentives to encourage rainforest nations to slow their deforestation rates. The second, to raise awareness of the link between rainforests and climate change.
www.rainforestsos.org