Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Sacred Journeys to the Land of the Incas

EL MUNDO MAGICO

Inca Trail to Machu Picchu

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Machu Picchu: Sanctuary and Ritual City in a Sacred Landscape

Hidden high in the clouds of the Andean snow-covered peaks, here lays the sacred ceremonial centre of Machu Picchu, a place of astounding beauty, where one thousand Incas worshipped the Sun, the Moon and the Earth, miraculously escaping the Spanish conquistadores. Many ideas have sprang from the mind of many scholars as to what essentially was Machu Picchu. When it was first discovered in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, American explorer and author, he wrongly assumed to have come across Vilcabamba, the fabled city of the Incas, where they lastly took refuge from the Spanish invaders. It was him who lended the place of Machu Picchu its actual name. A fascinating theory by anthropologist Johan Reinhard (author of "The Sacred Centre") sees the Sanctuary not as a citadel but as the focus of a sacred geography that mirrored on earth. Built on the spur of the most sacred apu - the great Salcantay mountain - it seats on the sacred Urubamba river and yet in sighting line of the other two divine apu's, the Pumasillo and Veronica mountains. Machu Picchu then would have been a "centre of the world", like Cusco - the "Earth's navel" - was the centre of the Inca empire. The whole region that is now encompassed in the "Inca Trail" would have been an area functional to a sacred pilgrimage, a ritual landscape immersed in the Inca cosmogony, rather than a mere functional network of roads and trails. It is with this same spirit of awe and wonder, that we hope you will approach the sacred path leading to these ancient and magical ruins.

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