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Updated: June 19, 2025
As will be shown later, it is possible that this Vilcabamba, referred to in Calancha's story as "Vilcabamba Viejo," was on the slopes of the mountain now called Machu Picchu.
His interest in Inca ruins was very keen. He devotes pages to Ollantaytambo. He failed to reach Machu Picchu or to find any ruins of importance in the Urubamba or Vilcabamba valleys. Could we hope to be any more successful? Would the rumors that had reached us "pan out" as badly as those to which Wiener had listened so eagerly?
R. S. Williams: Peruvian Mosses. Bulletin of Torrey Botanical Club, XLIII, 323-334, June, 1916. 4 pl. Many people have asked me how to pronounce Machu Picchu. Quichua words should always be pronounced as nearly as possible as they are written. They represent an attempt at phonetic spelling.
It will be remembered that while on the search for the capital of the last Incas we had found several groups of ruins which we could not fit entirely into the story of Manco and his sons. The most important of these was Machu Picchu. Many of its buildings are far older than the ruins of Rosaspata and Espiritu Pampa.
Here it would have been very easy for the Inca Titu Cusi to have kept the monks in the vicinity of the Sacred City for three weeks without their catching a single glimpse of its unique temples and remarkable palaces. It would have been possible for Titu Cusi to bring Friar Marcos and Friar Diego to the village of Intihuatana near San Miguel, at the foot of the Machu Picchu cliffs.
Since his day, to be sure, the Peruvian Government had actually finished a road which led past Machu Picchu. On the other hand, a Harvard Anthropological Expedition, under the leadership of Dr. William C. Farrabee, had recently been over this road without reporting any ruins of importance. They were looking for savages and not ruins.
So far as I know, there is no place in Peru where the ruins consist of anything like a "masonry wall with three windows" of such a ceremonial character as is here referred to, except at Machu Picchu. It would certainly seem as though the Temple of the Three Windows, the most significant structure within the citadel, is the building referred to by Pachacuti Yamqui Saleamayhua.
Safford has pointed out, among the artifacts discovered at Machu Picchu was a "snuffing tube" intended for use with the narcotic snuff which was employed by the priests and necromancers to induce a hypnotic state. This seems to me to furnish additional evidence of the identity of Machu Picchu with Calancha's "Vilcabamba."
One of the bifurcated tubes."in the first stages of manufacture," was found at Machu Picchu.
Although the amount of arable land which could be made available with the most careful terracing was not large enough to support a very great population, Machu Picchu offered an impregnable citadel to the chiefs and priests and their handful of followers who were obliged to flee from the rich plains near Cuzco and the broad, pleasant valley of Yucay.
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