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About the disoccupation when discovered |
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Everything indicates that the citadel of Machu Picchu was rapidly vacated after 1540, when the Spanish, in a campaign against the rebellious Incas of Vilcabamba, began their penetration into Cuzco lands. Vilcabamba is in the area and for this reason Hiram Bingham, along with his contemporaries from Cuzco, thought that it was a question of the "lost city" which served as the refuge of the celebrated warriors who kept up Inca resistance until 1572 when the last of them, the Inca Tupac Amaru, was taken prisoner and decapitated.
Picchu was initially given in encomienda to Hernando Pizarro and afterwards to a certain Arias Maldonado, also in the sixteenth century. In 1565, when the Inca Sayri Tupac was still alive in Vilcabamba, many towns in the area were already vacated, according to the declaration in a report the historian Richard Pietschmann published in 1910, which tells that Diego |
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Rodriguez de Figueroa slept in a depopulated town situated along the road which led to Picchu, which was probably also uninhabited. In that time the mummy of the Inca had already been sequestered by the Spanish to be taken to Lima.
Some years later, in 1568, the caciques of Picchu declared that the towns and the lands cultivated there were "for the sacrifices and ceremonies of the dead bodies" and that they had been abandoned since about 30 years before.
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