The Incas and Machu Picchu are inseparable: Machu Picchu was built by the Inca Empire around 1450 as a royal estate for the emperor Pachacuti, and it remains the clearest surviving window into how the Incas built, worshipped, and organized their world. Perched on a ridge nearly 8,000 feet above sea level in the Andes. It was never actually "lost," the Spanish never found it, but it was abandoned and overtaken by cloud forest for roughly 400 years before the outside world learned it existed.
This guide covers how the Incas built it, what daily and religious life there looked like, why it was abandoned, how it was rediscovered, and the questions people still ask most about it.
Who Built Machu Picchu, and Why
Machu Picchu was built by the Inca Empire under the emperor Pachacuti, who began expanding Inca territory from Cusco around 1438 and is generally credited with commissioning the site around 1450. It sat far enough from Cusco, the imperial capital, to function as a private royal retreat. But it also served as a religious sanctuary and likely an astronomical observatory: the Intihuatana stone at its center aligns with the sun at key points in the year, a detail that would have mattered enormously to a civilization that worshipped Inti, the sun god.
Building on a narrow mountain ridge was a deliberate choice, not a limitation the Incas worked around. The Incas viewed mountains, rivers, and the sun itself as sacred, and placing a royal and religious site at that elevation, between two peaks and above the Urubamba River, put it directly inside the landscape they considered holy.
How Inca Society Was Organized
The Inca Empire, Tawantinsuyu, was run by the Sapa Inca, an emperor considered a direct descendant of the sun. Below him sat a structured hierarchy: nobility and high priests, who lived in the empire's finer stone buildings; skilled artisans, who produced the textiles, ceramics, and metalwork the empire was known for; and farmers. Who made up most of the population and worked the land under the mit'a system, a rotating labor obligation owed to the state instead of paid in currency, since the Incas had no money economy.
Society was held together as much by a moral code as by force: ama suwa, ama llulla, ama qilla, "do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy," is still cited today as the core of Inca ethics. Everyday goods moved through the empire on the Inca road system, the Qhapaq Ñan, the same network of stone paths that the modern Inca Trail partly follows.
Religion and Daily Life
Inca religion centered on Inti (the sun), Pachamama (earth), and Viracocha (the creator god), with mountains, rivers, and stars treated as sacred in their own right. Priests performed regular offerings, and on important occasions those offerings included qhapaq hucha ceremonies, involving llamas, food, textiles, and, on the rarest and most significant occasions, children selected for their purity. Inti Raymi, the Festival of the Sun, was and remains the largest of these ceremonies, still celebrated in Cusco every June.
Daily life inside Machu Picchu revolved around agriculture, religious duty, and craft. Its famous terraces weren't decorative, they were functional farmland engineered to grow crops at different microclimates up and down the mountainside, and the site's population, estimated at a few hundred to around 750 people at its peak, included farmers, artisans, priests, and the household staff who supported the royal estate.
How the Incas Built It
Machu Picchu's stonework is the detail most visitors remember. Many of its walls use ashlar masonry, stones cut and fitted so precisely that no mortar was needed and a knife blade still can't slide between them. The Incas achieved this without iron tools, wheels, or a writing system, relying instead on stone hammers, bronze tools, ramps, levers, and an exact understanding of the mountain's geology, a combination historians still study today. For more on the objects this level of craftsmanship actually produced, see our guide to popular Inca artifacts, and for a second, equally impressive example of Inca stonework, our guide to the Sacsayhuaman ruins above Cusco.
Why Was Machu Picchu Abandoned?
No single confirmed reason survives in the historical record, but three theories dominate. The Spanish conquest of the 1530s collapsed the Inca Empire's leadership within a few years, and some historians believe Machu Picchu was deliberately abandoned to keep it out of Spanish hands, which would also explain why the conquistadors never recorded finding it. A smallpox epidemic, introduced before the Spanish themselves even arrived in the region, killed a large share of the population across the empire and may have emptied the site before anyone made a deliberate decision to leave. A smaller number of historians argue for a strategic withdrawal unrelated to the Spanish at all, tied to resource limits or a shift in the empire's priorities. All three theories are plausible, and it's possible more than one played a role at once.
Rediscovery and Life Today
Machu Picchu was never lost to the local population, Quechua farming families in the area knew about the ruins long before 1911, but that was the year American explorer Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention. Bingham photographed the site extensively, and National Geographic devoted its entire April 1913 issue to Machu Picchu, turning a local ruin into a global icon almost overnight. It's been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983 and was named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in 2007.
That fame comes with real pressure on the site. Annual visitors have grown from under 100,000 in the 1980s to approximately 1.6 million in 2025, with peak daily arrivals now capped around 5,600 during high season to manage erosion and structural strain. Timed entry, fixed circuits, and daily visitor limits are all a direct response to that growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who built Machu Picchu?
The Inca Empire, most likely commissioned by the emperor Pachacuti around 1450 as a royal estate and religious site.
Why was Machu Picchu abandoned?
No confirmed single reason survives, but the leading theories are that it was deliberately abandoned to avoid the Spanish conquest, emptied by a smallpox epidemic that preceded the Spanish into the region, or given up in a strategic withdrawal unrelated to the conquest at all.
Did the Aztecs build Machu Picchu?
No. Machu Picchu was built by the Inca Empire. The Aztecs were a separate civilization centered around modern-day Mexico, roughly 2,500 miles away, and never had any presence in the Andes. The mix-up comes from both being the two most famous pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, not from any real overlap between them.
Does anyone still live in Machu Picchu today?
No one lives inside the protected citadel itself. The staff who work there, guides, guards, and park workers, commute daily from the nearby town of Aguas Calientes (also called Machu Picchu Pueblo), about a 20-minute bus ride down the mountain.
Why did the Incas build Machu Picchu so high in the mountains?
Partly for defense and privacy, since it functioned as a royal retreat, and partly because the Incas considered mountains sacred. Its location also let the Intihuatana stone align precisely with the sun at key points in the year, which mattered directly to Inca religious practice.
See Machu Picchu the Way the Incas Reached It
Walk the Inca Trail to the Sun Gate, or ask us about a custom itinerary through Cusco and the Sacred Valley.
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Sources: National Geographic, on Hiram Bingham's 1911 expedition; Voyagers Travel, Machu Picchu Visitor Capacity Report 2026.
Related Guides: Popular Inca Artifacts · Sacsayhuaman Ruins · Classic Inca Trail to Machu Picchu · Fun Facts About Machu Picchu
