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Updated: June 22, 2025
Too often he had been over-enthusiastic about mines which did not "pan out." Yet his report resembled that of Charles Wiener, a French explorer, who, about 1875, in the course of his wanderings in the Andes, visited Ollantaytambo. While there he was told that there were fine ruins down the Urubamba Valley at a place called "Huaina-Picchu or Matcho-Picchu."
To be sure, the foreman was not a trained observer and his interest in Inca buildings was probably of the slightest. Yet the ruins of Ollantaytambo are so well known and so impressive that even the most casual traveler is struck by them and the natives themselves are enormously proud of them. The real cause of the foreman's inaccuracy was probably his desire to please.
When Arteaga learned that we were interested in the architectural remains of the Incas, he said there were some very good ruins in this vicinity in fact, some excellent ones on top of the opposite mountain, called Huayna Picchu, and also on a ridge called Machu Picchu. These were the very places Charles Wiener heard of at Ollantaytambo in 1875 and had been unable to reach.
On the east side of the pampa was a structure, 120 feet long by 21 feet wide, divided into five rooms of unequal size. The walls were of rough stones laid in adobe. Like some of the Inca buildings at Ollantaytambo, the lintels of the doors were made of three or four narrow uncut ashlars. Some rooms had niches. On the north side of the pampa was another rectangular building.
He must have been a very good administrator. To his people the magnificent megaliths were doubtless a source of pride. To his enemies they were a symbol of his power and might. Mt. Veronica and Salapunco, the Gateway to Uilcapampa A league below Ollantaytambo the road forks. The right branch ascends a steep valley and crosses the pass of Panticalla near snow-covered Mt. Veronica.
This is the earliest local record. Yet some one must have visited Machu Picchu long before that; because in 1875, as has been said, the French explorer Charles Wiener heard in Ollantaytambo of there being ruins at "Huaina-Picchu or Matcho-Picchu." He tried to find them.
The events described in the preceding chapter happened, for the most part, in Uiticos and Uilcapampa, northwest of Ollantaytambo, about one hundred miles away from the Cuzco palace of the Spanish viceroy, in what Prescott calls "the remote fastnesses of the Andes." One looks in vain for Uiticos on modern maps of Peru, although several of the older maps give it.
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