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Updated: June 26, 2025
Both causes undoubtedly contributed to the result. There seems to be no question that the population diminished enormously in early colonial days. If this is true, the remaining population would naturally have sought regions where the conditions of existence and human intercourse were less severe and rigorous than in the valleys of Uiticos and Uilcapampa.
Since the pool was an object of fear and mystery the seats were probably used only by priests or sorcerers. It would have been a splendid place to practice divination. No doubt the devils "roared." All our expeditions in the ancient province of Uilcapampa have failed to disclose the presence of any other "white rock over a spring of water" surrounded by the ruins of a possible "House of the Sun."
Besides Indians fleeing from harsh masters, there came to Uilcapampa, in 1542, Gomez Perez, Diego Mendez, and half a dozen other Spanish fugitives, adherents of Almagro, "rascals," says Calancha, "worthy of Manco's favor." Obliged by the civil wars of the conquistadores to flee from the Pizarros, they were glad enough to find a welcome in Uiticos.
Yet it is less than a hundred miles from Cuzco, the chief city in the Peruvian Andes, and the site of a university for more than three centuries. That Uilcapampa could so long defy investigation and exploration shows better than anything else how wisely Manco had selected his refuge. It is indeed a veritable labyrinth of snow-clad peaks, unknown glaciers, and trackless canyons.
With this increase has come a consequent crowding in certain localities. There would be a natural tendency to seek less crowded regions, even at the expense of using difficult mountain trails. This would lead to their occupying as remote and inaccessible a region as the ancient province of Uilcapampa.
These valleys are to be reached only through passes where the traveler is likely to be waylaid by violent storms of hail and snow. During the rainy season a large part of Uilcapampa is absolutely impenetrable. Even in the dry season the difficulties of transportation are very great. The most sure-footed mule is sometimes unable to use the trails without assistance from man.
When Don Pedro Duque of Santa Aria was helping us to identify places mentioned in Calancha and Ocampo, the references to "Vilcabamba Viejo," or Old Uilcapampa, were supposed by two of his informants to point to a place called Conservidayoc.
They are hunted for their beautiful pearly gray fur, the "chinchilla" of commerce; they are also very good eating, so they have disappeared from the more accessible parts of Peru. One rarely sees them, although they may be found on bleak uplands in the mountains of Uilcapampa, a region rarely visited by any one on account of treacherous bogs and deep tams.
Two leagues beyond Piri, at Salapunco, the road skirts the base of precipitous cliffs, the beginnings of a wonderful mass of granite mountains which have made Uilcapampa more difficult of access than the surrounding highlands which are composed of schists, conglomerates, and limestone.
Our subsequent excavations and the clearing made in 1912, to be described in a subsequent volume, has shown that this was the chief place in Uilcapampa. It did not take an expert to realize, from the glimpse of Machu Picchu on that rainy day in July, 1911, when Sergeant Carrasco and I first saw it, that here were most extraordinary and interesting ruins.
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