The lost city that wasn't really lost

The Machu Picchu is always described as a lost city, rediscovered against the odds in 1911. The truth is a fair bit messier and, honestly, more interesting. The Incas abandoned the city shortly before Spanish conquistadors reached the Cusco region in the 1530s, and by most accounts it was never entirely forgotten by everyone in the area afterwards.

When the explorer Hiram Bingham arrived at the site in 1911, he found three farming families already living there, quietly getting on with life among the ruins. Other visitors, including local landowners, had recorded seeing the site decades before Bingham ever set foot in Peru. He wasn't even looking for Machu Picchu when he found it. He was searching for Vilcabamba, the true last refuge of the Inca resistance against the Spanish, and stumbled instead onto something else entirely, a city that had simply never made it into the history books the way Vilcabamba had.

I painted Machu Picchu in watercolour and ink, those terraced ruins against the green mountains. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Machu Picchu, Peru · Travel Poster