The fabulous Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru. This was taken early in the morning, after having stayed overnight at the hotel on the edge of the site. If you want to see the city without hordes of tourists swarming over it, you need to be there before the first tourist train arrives in the morning, or after the last one has departed in the late afternoon.
Machu Picchu was constructed around 1450, at the height of the Inca Empire. It was abandoned less than 100 years later. It is likely that most of its inhabitants were wiped out by smallpox before the Spanish conquistadores arrived. Hiram Bingham, the credited discoverer of the site, along with several others, originally hypothesized that the citadel was the traditional birthplace of the Inca people or the spiritual center of the "Virgins of the Suns"
