Machu Picchu — The Lost City of the Clouds

It sits at 2,430 meters above sea level, on a narrow ridge between two mountain peaks, invisible from the valley below, unknown to the Spanish conquistadors who destroyed the Inca Empire around it. Built by Pachacuti in the 15th century, abandoned less than a hundred years later for reasons still debated, Machu Picchu was rediscovered by the Western world in 1911 when Hiram Bingham was led there by a local farmer who knew exactly where it was. The Inca who built it fitted stones together without mortar so precisely that a knife blade cannot be inserted between them. The walls have survived five hundred years of earthquakes that destroyed the Spanish buildings built around them. The Inca built for mountain conditions. The Spanish built for flatlands.

These signs carry the terraced mountain city, the Temple of the Sun, the interlocking stones, and the lost city that was never really lost — only undiscovered by the people who claimed to have found it.