Machu Picchu, Peru · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Machu Picchu was never found by the Spanish, but not because it was hiding especially well. 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 afterwards. When the explorer Hiram Bingham arrived in 1911, three farming families were already living there, and other visitors, including local landowners, had recorded seeing the ruins decades earlier. Bingham wasn't even looking for Machu Picchu. He was searching for Vilcabamba, the Incas' true last hideout from the Spanish, and stumbled onto something far better preserved instead.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.