Most visited Inca site

According to the latest figures from PromPeru, visitor numbers to the world-famous Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, located in the Andes mountains of the Cusco Region in southern Peru, have steadily been on the rise since the 1990s. In 1991, around 80,000 people visited the UNESCO World Heritage Site (inducted in 1983) and that had increased by more than five-fold as of 2000. In 2018, an unprecedented 1,578,030 visitors (up 12% from 2017) made their way to Peru’s most popular tourist attraction. Of the total, around one-fifth of the 2018 cohort were from Peru and the remainder hailed from outside the country.

This means that in 2018, on average, the famous Inca citadel received more than 4,300 people per day. During peak season (July to September), this figure rose to around 6,000 visitors per day.

Numbers to Machu Picchu continue to rise despite the Peruvian government, under pressure from UNESCO, stepping up conditions around entry in summer 2017, such as only being allowed to visit with a licensed tour guide, reducing tour group sizes and limiting visit duration to either a morning or afternoon slot.

Widely forgotten during the Spanish colonial period and early Peruvian Republican time, Machu Picchu was "rediscovered" in 1911 by Yale University historian Hiram Bingham. Bingham believed that he had found Vilcabamba, the final refuge of Manco Inca, but this is now disputed, as other ruins seem to have a better claim to the title. The Spanish conquistadors, the conquerors of the Incas, made no mention of Machu Picchu in the chronicles of their conquests. It is believed that they had failed to uncover the ancient city.