CaralLegend A city of six pyramid complexes, plazas and houses over 60 hectares in the Supe Valley, occupied roughly 2600 to 2000 BC, which puts it going strong while the great pyramids were rising in Egypt and 1,500 years before the Olmec.... Open it on the map · Read the story
Chan ChanLegend The largest adobe city in the Americas and the second largest in the world: about 20 square kilometres with a dense core of 6, all of it mud brick finished with mud, built by the Chimú as the capital of Chimor and holding 40,000... Open it on the map · Read the story
Machu PicchuLegend Built around 1450 to 1470 under Pachacuti at 2,430 metres on a ridge in the Eastern Cordillera, and abandoned somewhere between 1532 and 1565, not because the Spanish took it but because the empire it belonged to was collapsing... Open it on the map · Read the story
Paititi, the last Inca refugeLegend When Cusco fell the Inca state did not simply stop: a rump kingdom held out at Vilcabamba until 1572, and Jesuit letters describe a further refuge east of the Andes called Paititi, taking the treasure of the empire into the cloud... Open it on the map · Read the story
SacsayhuamánLegend Three terraced walls above Cusco at 3,701 metres, built dry with no mortar, out of limestone blocks weighing from 128 to nearly 200 tonnes, fitted so closely that a sheet of paper will not go between many of them. The stone came... Open it on the map · Read the story
Shanay-timpishka, the boiling riverLegend A river in the Peruvian Amazon that runs hot enough to kill. The highest temperature measured in it is 99.1 C in a hot spring and the highest average for the river itself is close to 95, over the lower 6.3 km of a 9 km course,... Open it on the map · Read the story
The Nasca linesLegend Across fifty kilometres of Peruvian desert, the Nasca people scraped away the dark stones to expose pale ground beneath, drawing hummingbirds, a monkey, a spider and dead-straight lines running to the horizon, between roughly 500... Open it on the map · Read the story
Every one of these is sourced
Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.
