The World Heritage Committee has inscribed 721 properties on the World Heritage List (554 cultural, 144 natural and 23 mixed in 124 States Parties). The List, arranged alphabetically by nominating State Party, is current as of December 2001. The list will be updated following the next meeting of the Committee in June 2002. The complete list is at UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

A UNESCO World Heritage Site

Machu Picchu

Even After It Was Abandoned, Machu Picchu and Its Legend Haunted the Conquistadors

In 1911, when the American explorer Hiram Bingham clambered up through a final thicket of rain forest to behold the ruins of Machu Picchu, he was only the first of millions who would follow him in a state of dazed wonder at the great Incan city.

Here was a mountain redoubt that the Spaniards never found. For years they’d heard rumors of a distant fortress haven, a last refuge for the remnants of Incan nobility and resistance. But they had figured that the interior of the Andes was simply too inaccessible and precipitous a place for any people to build a city.

They were half right and half wrong about the place. Where they were wrong is that such a place, indeed, existed. Machu Picchu – “Old Peak” – was a religious center and probable royal retreat that had been built about 70 or 80 years before the Spaniards arrived in Peru. Because Incan society was ruled from the top down, allowing for great secrecy, Machu Picchu was little-known to most of the population outside of the aristocracy and priesthood.

Where they were right was in suspecting that such a place could not be easily be sustained. When the smallpox the Spaniards unwittingly introduced to the population quickly became epidemic, virtually all of the people in the Incan empire who knew of Machu Picchu’s existence were soon dead. Even as the Spaniards later pondered the legend of a great Incan citadel, the object of their worries had been long abandoned and forgotten.

But beyond the sheer improbability of the place – at least from the Spaniards’ point of view – was its artfulness. The Incans had not only built a terraced stone settlement that could accommodate several hundred people atop a 9,000-foot mountain ringed by sheer canyons and even greater mountains, they had done so with exquisite workmanship. The Spaniards had shaken their heads in disbelief when they first saw the stone ramparts of the imperial Incan capital at Cuzco. There, gigantic blocks had been fitted together with such precision that even the finest stonemason’s tool could not wedge its way in between them. Here, at Machu Picchu, the builders had duplicated Cuzco’s great craft, constructing ramparts, houses, pathways, meeting halls, temples, granaries and terraces from millions of rocks that all seemed to have found the one perfect set of surrounding rocks in the universe that they could be fitted into.

The awe does not stop there. It’s useful to remember that the Incans were stone-age people. Though they had some metal-making, they had neither the technology nor resources to produce the kinds of iron-based weapons that the Spaniards used to conquer them. Their realm was a realm of wood, ceramics and rock. Yet with that limited array of materials, they conquered and administered an empire that stretched 2,000 miles along the spine of the Andes.

(One of the finest books on the topic of the disparate development of cultures is Germs, Guns and Steel, written in 1997 by Jared Diamond. In it, Diamond explains how geography and climate were the two great factors that allowed European and Asian cultures to become so much more technologically advanced than the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and the Americas.)

In 1983, UNESCO named Machu Picchu as Peru’s second World Heritage Site (the City of Cuzco was first). UNESCO cited the city’s magnificent site, its architecture and its significance as an almost perfectly preserved example of Incan technology and social organization.

Even before the heritage site designation, Machu Picchu had become one of the great stops on travelers’ must-see lists of world wonders. Today, more than 300,000 people visit this still remote site, eager to be dazzled by one of the greatest structures ever built by a stone-age people.— Patrick Totty