Machu Picchu

13.1631°S, 72.5450°W.

Machu Picchu in the Cusco region of southern Peru — a fifteenth-century Inca citadel built between approximately 1450 and 1480 CE under the emperor Pachacuti, on a saddle ridge 2,430 metres above sea level between the Huayna Picchu and Machu Picchu peaks. The site consists of approximately 200 structures built of mortarless dressed-stone polygonal masonry, including a sun temple, the Intihuatana ritual stone, agricultural terraces, residential buildings, and storehouses. Population estimates at peak occupation range from 500 to 1,000 inhabitants. Machu Picchu was abandoned at or shortly before the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire in 1532, was never located by the Spanish, and remained known only to local farmers until brought to international attention by the American historian Hiram Bingham in 1911 (though earlier European visitors had reached the site). UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983.

The most-photographed pre-Columbian monument in the Americas, in a city that the Spanish empire never found, on a mountain that loses approximately one centimetre per year to erosion that the modern Peruvian state cannot fully arrest.