Guardhouse with Machu Picchu mountain in the background

The beautiful city of Machu Picchu, cradled on a narrow high mountain ridge, did not spring full-blown without a plan. It is the legacy of thousands of years of Andean cultures which fostered sophisticated architects, engineers, astronomers and artists.

Nearly seven thousand years before Machu Picchu was founded, Andeans had domesticated the potato. Two thousand years before construction began on the city pre-Inca artists were creating elaborate golden pendants in other cities in Peru.The people were communicating and keeping records with quipus,a complicated system of colored strings which had varied sized and spaced knots.

When Machu Picchu was built, about 1450 AD, thousands of agricultural terraces already lined the mountain slopes of the Andean highlands in what was to become part of the huge Inca empire.