DISCOVERY OF

MACCHU PICCHU
SANDRA DEYANIRA GAMARRA NIETO
Hiram Bingham re-discovered the 'lost' city of the Incas
on 24 July 1911
The spectacular ‘lost city of the Incas’ high among the
Andes mountains in Peru attracts so many visitors
today. Hiram Bingham, the man who first revealed it
to the world, was a buccaneering American explorer,
born in Hawaii in 1875.
In 1909 he explored historic South American trade routes
and took the old one from Buenos Aires to Lima in Peru,
going on to Cuzco. In 1911 he led a small expedition to
Peru in search of the ‘lost city’ of Vilcabamba, the last
refuge of the Inca Manco Capac II

This took Bingham and his party of seven to Cuzco and

from there by mule and on foot to a small settlement
called Mandor Pampa, near Aguas Calientes, where they
encountered a local farmer named Melchor Arteaga.
Through Bingham’s policeman-interpreter, Arteaga told
him that there were extensive ruins high in the
mountains nearby at what Arteaga in his native Quechua
called Machu Picchu, meaning ‘old mountain’.
Bingham was sure he had discovered Vilcabamba. He
believed that to the end of his life
 The Spanish conquistadors never saw Machu Picchu and consequently
never wrote about it. A few other outsiders had seen it in the years before
Bingham, but he was the one who revealed it to the world at large and it
made him famous.