Machu Picchu History: Who Built It, Why, and Why It Was Abandoned
Machu Picchu was built by the Incas in the 15th century as a royal estate of the ruler Pachacuti, and radiocarbon dates published in 2021 show it was already occupied by about AD 1420, which makes it roughly 600 years old. People lived there for about a century, until the Spanish conquest of the 1530s broke the Inca state that kept it running, and the estate was gradually left to the forest. The Spaniards never found it, local farmers never forgot it, and the American explorer Hiram Bingham made it famous in 1911. Here is that story, told the way our guides tell it on site, and where to see each chapter of it when you visit.
Machu Picchu history at a glance
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. AD 1420 | Earliest radiocarbon dates for people living at Machu Picchu (Burger et al., *Antiquity*, 2021) |
| 1438 | Pachacuti takes power in Cusco, according to the Spanish chronicles; for decades this was taken as the start of the site |
| c. 1420–1530s | Machu Picchu works as a royal estate, staffed by retainers from across the Inca empire |
| 1532 | Spaniards capture the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca; the Inca state begins to collapse |
| 1530s onwards | The estate is gradually abandoned; the Spaniards never reach it |
| 14 July 1902 | Cusco farmer Agustín Lizárraga writes his name and the date in charcoal on a wall of the Temple of the Three Windows |
| 24 July 1911 | Hiram Bingham, leading a Yale expedition, is guided to the ruins by local farmer Melchor Arteaga |
| 1912 | Yale and the National Geographic Society excavate; thousands of objects are shipped to Yale |
| 8 January 1981 | Peru creates the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu |
| 1983 | UNESCO inscribes the sanctuary on the World Heritage List, for both its culture and its nature |
| 7 July 2007 | Machu Picchu is voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World |
| 2011–2012 | Yale returns the Machu Picchu collection to Peru; it goes to Casa Concha in Cusco |
| 2021 | New radiocarbon dates move the start to c. 1420; a separate study argues the site's original name was Huayna Picchu, or simply Picchu |
Who built Machu Picchu?
The Incas built Machu Picchu, and most historians and archaeologists agree that it belonged to Pachacuti (Pachacútec in Spanish), the ruler who turned the small kingdom of Cusco into an empire that ran along the Andes. The key evidence is documentary. In 1990 the American archaeologist John Rowe published 16th-century Spanish papers from Cusco showing that the lands of Picchu were part of the estate of Pachacuti's lineage. Since then the site has been read as a royal estate, a private property of the Inca and his family, rather than a fortress or a lost city.
Pachacuti did not cut the stones himself, of course. The Inca state ran on mit'a, a labour tax that communities paid by sending workers in turns, and on yanaconas, retainers who served the nobility for life. The skilled stonemasons who shaped the finest walls worked alongside crews who levelled the ridge, built the terraces and laid the drains.
We now know a lot about the people who lived there afterwards. A 2023 ancient DNA study in *Science Advances*, led by researchers from Yale with partners including Cusco's San Antonio Abad University, analysed 34 people buried at Machu Picchu and found that they came from all over the empire, from the Andean highlands to the coast and the Amazon. Machu Picchu was not a village of local farmers: it was a royal household, with servants brought in from many conquered peoples.
How old is Machu Picchu? The 2021 radiocarbon dates
For most of the 20th century, the date of Machu Picchu came from the Spanish chronicles, which say Pachacuti took power in 1438. Because the site was his estate, scholars assumed it had been built after that, and many books still say construction started around the middle of the 15th century.
In August 2021, the journal *Antiquity* published new AMS radiocarbon dates by Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar of Yale, with Jason Nesbitt, Eden Washburn and Lars Fehren-Schmitz. They dated the bones and teeth of 26 people buried in four cemeteries around the site, excavated by Bingham's team in 1912. The results show that people were living at Machu Picchu continuously from about AD 1420 to the early 1530s. That means the site was occupied at least two decades earlier than the chronicles suggest, and that the Inca chronology based on those colonial texts needs revising.
So, how old is Machu Picchu? About 600 years old. The people tested show few signs of heavy labour, so they were probably the estate's retainers rather than its builders, and construction must have begun before the earliest burials.
Why was Machu Picchu built?
As an estate for the Inca and his court. Inca rulers owned country residences outside Cusco, with palaces, temples, farmland and servants; Pisac and Ollantaytambo, in the Sacred Valley, belonged to the same system. Machu Picchu was one of the most spectacular of them: a palace and sanctuary on a ridge at 2,430 m (7,970 ft), between the sacred peaks of Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu and wrapped by a loop of the Urubamba River.
Religion was part of the design. The city has temples for the Sun, carved sacred rocks and shrines facing the surrounding mountains, which the Incas worshipped as apus. Some researchers stress this sacred side and see the site as a place of pilgrimage. Our guides explain it as both: a royal retreat where the Inca rested, held ceremonies and hosted guests, in a landscape that was itself sacred.
What it was not is a fortress, or the last refuge of the Incas. That was Vilcabamba, deeper in the jungle, where the Inca resistance held out until 1572. Bingham was actually looking for Vilcabamba when he reached Machu Picchu.
How the Incas built it: stone, terraces and drains
Machu Picchu sits on a ridge of granite, and the builders used the mountain itself. You can still see the quarry inside the city, with half-worked blocks. The walls follow two styles. The temples and royal buildings use ashlar: blocks cut and polished to fit so tightly that no mortar was needed. Houses and storehouses use rougher fieldstone set in clay.
The trapezoidal doors, windows and niches are typical of Inca architecture, and so are walls that lean slightly inwards. Together with the tight-fitting stones, these shapes help the buildings hold up in a region of frequent earthquakes: in a tremor the blocks can shift and settle back rather than collapse.
The less visible work is the most impressive. The civil engineer Kenneth Wright, who studied the site with Peruvian colleagues, estimated that some 60% of the construction effort lies underground, in foundations, fill and drainage. The site receives close to 2,000 mm of rain a year, and the terraces are built in layers of stone, gravel and soil so that water filters down instead of washing them away. Wright counted 129 drain outlets in the urban sector alone, and a spring on the mountain fed a chain of stone fountains that still carries water today.
Why was Machu Picchu abandoned?
Machu Picchu was not destroyed. It emptied, and the radiocarbon dates end around the 1530s, the decade of the Spanish conquest. A royal estate needed the Inca state to work: the lineage that owned it, the labour sent from the provinces and the roads and storehouses that supplied it. When that state broke, there was no reason or means to keep the household running.
Several blows came close together. A civil war between the brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa had just divided the empire when the Spaniards captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532. European diseases such as smallpox had spread ahead of the conquerors and killed many people, including, according to the chronicles, the ruler Huayna Capac. With Cusco in Spanish hands, the retainers of Machu Picchu were free to go home, or were taken elsewhere, and the estate fell silent.
There is no evidence of a battle, a plague inside the city or a sudden disaster at the site. The story is simpler and sadder: a palace that depended on an empire outlived it by only a few years.
Why the Spaniards never found Machu Picchu
The conquerors looted Cusco, Pisac and many other Inca sites, but there is no record that they ever reached Machu Picchu. The site was hidden on a ridge above a deep, forested canyon, away from the main roads that the Spaniards followed, and once its people left it was no longer an important place. That is why its temples were never dismantled for a church, and why it survived so complete.
It was never completely forgotten, though. Colonial documents mention the lands of Picchu, and in the 19th century the area was divided among farms. When Bingham arrived, local families were already living among the ruins.
Lizárraga, the farmers and Hiram Bingham (1911)
On 14 July 1902, a Cusco farmer named Agustín Lizárraga climbed to the ruins with companions and wrote his name and the date in charcoal on a wall of the Temple of the Three Windows. When Bingham arrived nine years later, he saw the inscription and wrote Lizárraga's name in his notebook. Peruvian historians have long insisted on this: Bingham did not discover Machu Picchu, he made it known to the world.
Hiram Bingham III was a Yale lecturer leading an expedition in search of Vilcabamba. On 24 July 1911, a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, guided him up the slope with a Peruvian police sergeant named Carrasco. Near the top they found families, including the Richarte and Álvarez households, growing crops on the Inca terraces and drinking from the Inca canal. A boy from one of these families led Bingham through the overgrown buildings.
Bingham returned in 1912 with the support of Yale and the National Geographic Society, cleared the vegetation and excavated the city and its burial caves. In April 1913 *National Geographic* devoted an entire issue to the site, with his photographs, and Machu Picchu became world-famous almost overnight.
The Yale controversy and the pieces that came home
Between 1912 and 1915, Bingham's expeditions shipped thousands of objects to Yale: pottery, metal pieces, bones and other remains from the excavations. Peru understood they had been lent for study and asked for them back for decades; Yale held that much of the collection had left legally. After years of negotiation, Peru filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2008.
The dispute ended with an agreement in November 2010. Yale returned the collection in stages from 2011, the centenary of Bingham's arrival, and the last shipment, mostly pottery fragments, was sent at the end of 2012. The objects are now kept by the UNSAAC–Yale International Center for the Study of Machu Picchu and Inca Culture, run with Cusco's San Antonio Abad University in Casa Concha, a colonial mansion built on Inca foundations a short walk from Cusco's Main Square. It is worth a visit on your free day in the city.
The bones studied for the 2021 dates and the 2023 DNA analysis come from this same 1912 collection, so the most recent science about Machu Picchu rests on Bingham's excavations.
Was it really called Machu Picchu?
Possibly not. Machu Picchu means old peak in Quechua and is the name of the large mountain south of the ruins. In a 2021 paper in the journal *Ñawpa Pacha*, the historian Donato Amado Gonzales, of Peru's Ministry of Culture in Cusco, and the archaeologist Brian S. Bauer argued that the Incas probably called the city Huayna Picchu, or simply Picchu. Their evidence includes Bingham's own field notes, which record Huayna Picchu as a local name for the ruins, an atlas published in 1904 that marks Inca ruins called Huayna Picchu, and a late 16th-century Spanish account of a place called Picchu.
It is a proposal, not a settled fact, and nobody expects the name to change. But it is a good reminder that the name on your ticket is the one Bingham made famous.
From ruin to World Heritage and New Wonder
Peru created the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu on 8 January 1981, protecting not just the citadel but the surrounding mountains, forests and Inca roads, including the Inca Trail. Two years later, in 1983, UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List as a mixed site, valued both for its culture and for its nature: one of very few places in the world with that double recognition.
On 7 July 2007, Machu Picchu was announced in Lisbon as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, chosen by a global public vote. Visitor numbers have grown ever since, which is why the Ministry of Culture now limits daily capacity and organises the visit on fixed circuits, explained in our guide to the Machu Picchu circuits.
How to see this history on your visit
Every circuit shows a different chapter, so it is worth choosing with the history in mind. These are the places our guides use to tell the story:
The quarry and the Temple of the Three Windows (Circuit 2). The unfinished blocks of the quarry show how the city was built, and the Three Windows wall is where Lizárraga left his name in 1902. Circuit 2 also passes the Main Temple and the Sacred Rock, the heart of the religious sector.
The Temple of the Sun and the Royal Tomb (Circuit 3). The curved tower of the Temple of the Sun is the finest ashlar at Machu Picchu, and its window is aligned with the sunrise of the June solstice. Beneath it is a carved cave known as the Royal Tomb.
The House of the Inca and the Stairway of Fountains (Circuit 3). The rooms traditionally identified as Pachacuti's residence, next to the first of the stone fountains that still carry spring water through the city.
The Temple of the Condor (Circuit 3). Natural rock and Inca walls shaped together into the outline of a condor with open wings.
The Intihuatana, a carved stone on top of a stepped hill used in rituals linked to the sun, and the Guardian's House on the upper terraces, where you see the city as Bingham photographed it. Ask us which of them your route passes, because access depends on the circuit.
If history is your main interest, our advice is simple: Circuit 2 for the city and the classic view, Circuit 3 for the royal and religious buildings, or both on two tickets. Compare the routes in our Machu Picchu circuits guide before you book.
Visit Machu Picchu with a guide who knows the story
Machu Picchu is a pile of beautiful stones without someone to explain it. All our Machu Picchu tours include a licensed guide who walks the circuit with you and tells this history on site.
On our Peru 7 days package you see the Sacred Valley, including Ollantaytambo, another Inca royal site, before sleeping in Aguas Calientes and visiting Machu Picchu with a two-hour guided tour. The Peru 9 days package adds the coast and the Ica desert to the same Cusco and Machu Picchu route. If you want to arrive as the Inca nobility did, on foot along a royal road, the Classic Inca Trail passes several Inca sites over four days and enters the city through the Sun Gate. Our guide on how to get to Machu Picchu compares the train and the trek, and the best time to visit explains the seasons.
Frequently asked questions
Who built Machu Picchu?
The Incas. Most historians link it to Pachacuti, the ruler who expanded the Inca state into an empire, because 16th-century documents show the lands of Picchu belonged to his royal estate. The work was done by labour sent from Inca communities under the mit'a system, with specialist stonemasons for the finest walls.
How old is Machu Picchu?
About 600 years old. Radiocarbon dates published in Antiquity in 2021 show people were living there from about AD 1420, at least two decades earlier than the date of 1438 taken from the Spanish chronicles.
Why was Machu Picchu built?
As a royal estate for the Inca ruler and his court: a country palace with temples, terraces and servants, set among mountains that the Incas considered sacred. It was not a fortress or the last refuge of the Incas, which was Vilcabamba.
Why was Machu Picchu abandoned?
Because the Inca state that supported it collapsed. Occupation ends around the 1530s, after the civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa, the spread of European diseases and the Spanish conquest. Without the empire, the royal estate had no owners, workers or supplies, and its people left.
Did Hiram Bingham discover Machu Picchu?
No. Local farmers knew it and some families were living there when he arrived on 24 July 1911, guided by Melchor Arteaga. Agustín Lizárraga had written his name on a wall in 1902. Bingham's achievement was to excavate the site and make it world-famous.
Did the Spanish find Machu Picchu?
There is no record that they ever reached it. The site lay off the main roads, above a deep canyon, and was abandoned soon after the conquest, which is why its temples survived intact.
Did Yale return the Machu Picchu artifacts?
Yes. Under an agreement signed in November 2010, Yale returned the collection excavated by Bingham between 2011 and the end of 2012. It is now kept at Casa Concha in Cusco, by a centre run with the San Antonio Abad University of Cusco.
What was Machu Picchu's original name?
We do not know for certain. A 2021 study by Donato Amado Gonzales and Brian S. Bauer argues that the Incas probably called it Huayna Picchu, or simply Picchu, and that the name Machu Picchu became fixed after Bingham's expedition.
When did Machu Picchu become a World Heritage Site?
In 1983, when UNESCO inscribed the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu as a mixed cultural and natural site. In 2007 it was also voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.
Official sources: UNESCO World Heritage: Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu · Ministry of Culture of Peru · Ministry of Culture of Peru: official Machu Picchu and Inca Trail tickets · Ministry of Culture of Peru: Machu Picchu circuits and visiting routes (route maps and panels) · Burger, Salazar, Nesbitt, Washburn and Fehren-Schmitz: New AMS dates for Machu Picchu: results and implications, Antiquity 95 (2021) · Salazar, Burger et al.: Insights into the genetic histories and lifeways of Machu Picchu’s occupants, Science Advances (2023) · Amado Gonzales and Bauer: The Ancient Inca Town Named Huayna Picchu, Ñawpa Pacha (2021) · John H. Rowe: Machu Picchu a la luz de documentos del siglo XVI, Histórica 14(1), 1990 · Kenneth R. Wright, Water History: Machu Picchu water supply and drainage engineering · Yale Alumni Magazine: Machu Picchu relics returned to Peru (2012)
