Machu Picchu: casi 40 mil turistas visitaron la ciudadela inca a un mes de su reapertura

Más del 80 por ciento de las visitas fueron de extranjeros. El Camino Inca recibió alrededor cinco mil visitantes, todos ellos foráneos
Jueves 06 de mayo de 2010 - 03:10 pm
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Unos 38 mil 454 turistas visitaron la ciudadela incaica de Machu Picchu a un mes de su reapertura al público tras las lluvias que dañaron la vía férrea que permite el acceso, informó hoy el Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC) en Cusco.

Según los reportes de abril, publicados por la agencia estatal Andina, de dicha cifra 33 mil 211 fueron extranjeros y cinco mil 243, nacionales, lo que evidenciaría que el interés del visitante foráneo se mantiene.

Machu Picchu fue reabierta el 1 de abril en una ceremonia especial que contó con la participación de la actriz estadounidense Susan Sarandon.

Las estadísticas muestran que aquel día la ciudadela recibió mil 688 visitas, el 2 de abril fueron mil 822 y el día tres unos mil 686. El promedio diario en todo el mes superó las mil personas.

Respecto al Camino Inca, también reabierto el 1 de abril, el INC-Cusco indicó que fue recorrido por cuatro mil 848 turistas, todos ellos extranjeros, entre adultos y estudiantes.

President Garcia encourages tourists to visit Cusco and enjoy its festivals

Peru’s president Alan Garcia Thursday encouraged world tourists to visit Cusco and be part of its religious festivals, such as the Inti Raymi.

“We want to confirm Cusco's national identity and rescue its huge historic value, we also want the whole world to continue admiring Cusco,” he said.

Garcia said he was very pleased that once again Cusco authorities chose the Government Palace to launch this initiative.

“This house is honored with the presence of you all to attend the Inty Raymi, Qoyllurit’y and the Mamacha Carmen,” he stated.

During the ceremony held at the Honor Yard of the Government Palace, Garcia stressed on the need to continue promoting Cusco's religious festivals.

Capital of the Incas: Cusco

CUSCO -- Peru is the third largest country in South America after Brazil and Argentina with a total area of 1,285,216 square kilometers.
It is the 20th largest country in the world in terms of area. Peru is bordered by Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador. Western Peru is bordered by the Pacific Ocean, and the total length of its beaches is about 2,500 kilometers. The Andes Mountains are located towards the center of the country running from north to south. The highest peak is almost 7,000 meters. Due to its close proximity to the equator, Peru is subject to quite direct rays of the sun. You can suffer sunburn if you do not take precautions.

Argentinean José de San Martin proclaimed Peru’s independence in 1821. Peruvians do not much care about arms because they believe that the United Nations will protect them in the event of war. Peruvian people love to have fun and dance more than anything.

Although Lima is the current capital of Peru, the capital of the Inca Empire was Cusco. Cusco means ‘center of the world’ in Quechua. It is one-hour flight from Lima. Those who travel from Lima, which is at sea level, to Cusco, which is 3,450 meters above sea level, may suffer from altitude sickness

Since the country was dominated by Spaniards for 300 years, the official language is Spanish. Spanish is used in official paperwork. Moreover, along with Colombia, Peru is known as a country where the best Spanish is spoken. The local Quechua language is still alive among the people. The language is written in the Latin alphabet because Quechua had no written alphabet.

In Quechua, Peru means the “land of abundance.” Among its population of 29 million people, 45 percent are Amerindians, the indigenous people of Peru; 37 percent are mestizo, people of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry; and 15 percent are Europeans. There is also a significant minority from Africa, Japan and China, comprising 3 percent of the population. Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is of Japanese descent. Most of the population follows Christianity. The number of Muslim believers is small. Out of the 29 million people in this country, only 600 are Muslims.

City center, Cuso

Although Lima is the current capital of Peru, the capital of the Inca Empire was Cusco. Cusco means “center of the world” in Quechua. It is one-hour flight from Lima. Those who travel from Lima, which is at sea level, to Cusco, which is 3,450 meters above sea level, may suffer from altitude sickness. The body may have difficulty in adapting to such a change in an hour. Therefore, visitors of Cusco are advised to spend some time resting once they arrive in the city.

The population of the Cusco region is about 5 million. The largest square in the city is called Wakaypata in Quechua, meaning the “crying sector.” Almost everywhere in the city is filled with tourists. Tourists get tired soon due to the city’s altitude as the breathing rate increases and the heart beats faster. This is normal for local people.

The historical features of the city have been preserved as much as possible. Traces of colonial times can still be felt in the architecture and the arrangement of the streets.

Stones, used in the construction of palaces and city walls in particular, clearly show how architecture developed in Incan times. Large, smooth stones, carefully slotted together, made quite strong structures. There are even stones with 12 corners. In a period when cement did not exist, buildings were made strong in this way.

Machu Picchu, Cusco

Some people earn a living taking photographs of people in Cusco’s square. Local people wearing traditional clothes come to the square with their dogs and goats and earn money by posing with tourists for photos. Those portraying Incan kings with their weapons and crowns attract more attention from tourists, who experience the thrill of taking a photo with an Incan king.
Cusco: A lively city

You can encounter many different activities and events as you stroll around the city. Festivals are a common sight: The streets of Cusco play host to festivals, which are held by different towns, almost all the time. Peruvians from different towns and cities keep their traditions alive with their traditional clothes and dances during these festivals. Both tourists and Peruvians are excited to witness these different cultures. Although it is known that there are many types of corn, purple corn is not well known. Purple corn is an agricultural product that can be found only in Cusco. Peruvians call it “mai morado.”

There are no legal obstacles to selling coca leaves, which is the raw material for cocaine, in Cusco. Thus, you can frequently find coca leaves in the markets of Cusco. Local people make tea out of these leaves or they chew them. Unfortunately, forests surrounding the city are destroyed to raise coca plants. Peru is the second largest cocaine producer in the world.

There are a lot of butcher’s shops where meat is sold outside. Slaughtered chickens are sold with their feet still attached. It is possible to see dozens of people waiting in the marketplace with their cell phones in their hands. These people make money by letting people who urgently need to use a telephone use their phones. People in need use their phones and pay them. This is one way to earn money here.

[QUICK FACTS]

Capital: Lima
Official language: Spanish and Quechua
Government: Constitutional republic
President: Alan Garcia Perez
Area: 1,285,216 square kilometers
Population: 29,546,963*
Gross domestic product (PPP): $253 billion**
Main religions: Roman Catholic (81.3 percent), Evangelical (12.5 percent)

*July 2009 estimate
**2009 estimate

The most popular food is here is ceviche. In this quintessential dish of Peru, they use raw sliced fish marinated in lemon and lime. Sweet potatoes are also an essential part of Peruvian cuisine. Mai morado is the most popular beverage, which is made out of the juice of the purple corn. Sugar is added to the purple corn juice and left to sit for one day before being served. It is also served with pineapple or apple.

As the female population is greater than the male population, it is normal to see females in every business here. For example, traffic officers are mostly women.

Peru has many natural beauties. It also has a wealth in underground resources, including bronze, silver, gold, oil, natural gas and coal. Agriculture, fishing and logging have an important place in the country’s economy.

There is a Turkish Cultural Center in Lima, but there are only 20 Turks living in the country. The center holds events to bring Turkish people together with Peruvians. They gather at the center, eating desserts and chatting. There are even Peruvians who are trying to learn Turkish. As a result of the efforts of the Catarata Education Company, Turkish is taught as a foreign language at a state school in Peru.

Peru: Lawmakers from Spain visited Cusco and Machu Picchu

A delegation of Spanish lawmakers visited Cusco and Machu Picchu and were delighted with the experience, reports TNews.

Cusco Regional President, Hugo Gonzáles Sayán, told Andina news agency that the visitors also had a positive impression of the works being carried out after the emergency caused by last January's rainfalls and floods.

“They are impressed with the way Cusco develops tourism sector in Peru,” said Gonzalez, adding that he expects them to spread the word about these positive things that they observed in Peru.

“This has been a protocolar and touristic visit,” commented Gonzalez.

Travel: Machu Picchu, Peru

IT IS one of the most famous treks in the world – a four-day hike tracing the relics of a remarkable civilisation to the extraordinary Machu Picchu. which has just reopened after being closed by a mudslide earlier this year.


The Inca Trail is not for the faint-hearted – with a seemingly endless series of climbs and descents, altitude sickness, and the occasional downpour to weather – but the rewards are more than worth it.

Our group included a mix of Americans and Poles, one New Zealander and one Briton. Relatively young and fit, we took to the trail with gusto, typically completing each stage in half the allotted time.

At each break we would stop for a breather and lunch, and marvel at yet another 500-year-old ruin from an empire that stretched up and down the west side of the Andes mountain range, into modern day Chile, Bolivia and Argentina.

The trail links the holy city of Machu Picchu with the formal capital of Cusco. In the days of the Inca, scouts would have raced along this route in less than a day to pass a message from one city to the next, warning of an attack or passing on information about farming.

Watching our own porters happily skip from rock to rock, carrying almost their own bodyweight in food and camping equipment as we trudged along at half the pace and with half the weight, it was not difficult to picture their ancestors making equally light of their surroundings.

The first day was a relatively straightforward six hours, largely uphill, but on a gentle gradient. The second day – we had been warned – was the killer. Dead Woman's Pass, at 4,200ft, is the highest point on the trail. When we arrived after a two-hour climb it was easy to feel optimistic about the day ahead; surely it was all downhill from there.

Well, not exactly – we actually went downhill, then uphill again, and then downhill once more. After eight hours of alternating ascent and descent, there was a final, mammoth staircase of rocks to take us up to Sayacmarca, an old Inca base and watchtower.

Some members took one look at the steep staircase and headed on to camp. A glutton for punishment, I climbed on up and, despite my weary body, blistered hands and throbbing knees, tried to enjoy exploring a series of former rooms from where Inca soldiers would have kept watch for signs of invading armies.

One of the glories of the Inca Trail is that the altitude and distance from any major city creates the clearest skies you will ever see. Like the ancient Cambodians who built Angkor Wat, the Incas were able astronomers and the Intiwatana observatory stands at the highest point of Machu Picchu, from where they would have gazed at the stars.

The third day was mercifully shorter. The six-hour hike took us past ruins, including the former Inca village of Winay Wayna, the largest and most complete Inca site on the way to Machu Picchu.

Made up of 90 per cent original stones, it also has the famous large steps that are found in Machu Picchu, which farmers would have used to grow different crops. The dozens of families who lived here would have had one room each in which to sleep, eat and wash, and through which tourists are free to meander.

Also like Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu was lost for centuries. The Incas were so keen to hide it from the invading Spanish that they destroyed many parts of the trail and left the city half-built. It was only in 1915 that history professor Hiram Bingham was led to the ruins by local farmers. What they showed him that day must have left him speechless – it certainly had that impact on me.

The sacred city of the Incas is a wondrous complex of temples and ruins, towers and steps, framed on all sides by steep mountains. We left camp on the fourth day at just before 5am, as the morning darkness gave way to milky pre-dawn light. At that time of day, the only sounds were the rushing river below and our creaking bones.

About a hundred weary bodies then started a two-hour charge to Machu Picchu, as tickets to climb the postcard-famous Wayna Picchu mountain are limited. We stopped briefly at the Sun Gate, which sadly failed to live up to its name as dense fog covered the ancient city stretching out below. However, as we completed the final leg, the mist lifted to reveal Machu Picchu like jewels beneath a blanket.

The famous giant steps, which resemble natural football terraces, were for agriculture and used to study failing crops and cross-pollinations. Built more than 500 years ago, they look as good as new thanks to the Incas' success in using mud and llama hair as an adhesive to hold the rocks in place.

Amid the thatched roof buildings the Incas would have used for storage, and water fountains where noblemen would have cleaned themselves before entering, are towers, temples, a sundial and several grazing llamas who look a lot less impressed by their surroundings than the hordes of camera-happy tourists.

In one corner Wayna Picchu pokes its 300m-high head above the clouds and looks down on the old city. It takes two hours to climb up and down the mountain, using steps the Incas themselves laid, but the spectacular views more than compensate for the effort.

The one downside to Machu Picchu is the number of visitors. We were one of three groups walking the trail, but we only passed occasionally and the ruins were largely deserted. However, a lot of tourists get the train across and the site itself is far more crowded. Trains go from the beautiful Peruvian city of Cusco – the Inca empire's capital – to Aguas Calientes, from where it is a short bus ride to the heritage site.

Staying overnight in Aguas Calientes, a town that gives the impression of being half-built because of all the bare brick buildings, but which is stocked with restaurants, souvenir shops and hotels, means you can visit Machu Picchu first thing in the morning, guaranteeing an option on one of the 400 daily places climbing Wayna Picchu, either at 7am or 10am. However, the town has little to recommend it and for those who really want to learn about the history of the area, and enjoy a challenge, walking the Inca Trail is the way to go.

Broads Authority mulls World Heritage bid

The status would put the area on a par with the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, Victoria Falls and the Great Barrier Reef.

The decision to bid for recognition of the Broads as a cultural landscape under the World Heritage Convention, was first mooted in 2005/6, but was put on hold to await government guidance.

Broads Authority members will meet to discuss whether the Authority should go ahead with its bid this Friday (14th).

Broads Authority chief executive John Packman said: "The Broads is a very special area and we believe merits this international recognition.

"Our preliminary view suggests that the Broads would meet the UK criteria in three of the ten categories under which sites can be nominated. As a member of the UK’s family of National Parks we are some distance there already."

There are 28 World Heritage Sites in the UK including Durham Cathedral and Castle, Canterbury Cathedral, Ironbridge Gorge, Stonehenge, Blenheim Palace, the City of Bath, Tower of London, Palace of Westminister, Dorset and East Devon Coast, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape.

Peru; Machu Picchu received more than 38,400 tourists in April

More than 38,400 tourists visited Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, one month after its official reopening to tourism, reports the National Institute of Culture, or INC.

The citadel remain closed for almost two months, due to the severe damage that last January's rainfalls and floods caused to the railways, which is the only access.

According to Andina news agency, more than 33,000 of those visitors were foreigners, which indicates that the place still draws lots of attention.

Machu Picchu was officially reopened on April 1, with a special ceremony with the presence of the American actress Susan Sarandon; that day the citadel had 1,688 visitors.

The average number of daily visitors was higher than 1,000 during all April.

Ruisn of Machupicchu

The ruins of Machu Picchu, rediscovered in 1911 by Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham, are one of the most beautiful and enigmatic ancient sites in the world. While the Inca people certainly used the Andean mountain top (9060 feet elevation), erecting many hundreds of stone structures from the early 1400's, legends and myths indicate that Machu Picchu (meaning 'Old Peak' in the Quechua language) was revered as a sacred place from a far earlier time. Whatever its origins, the Inca turned the site into a small (5 square miles) but extraordinary city. Invisible from below and completely self-contained, surrounded by agricultural terraces sufficient to feed the population, and watered by natural springs, Machu Picchu seems to have been utilized by the Inca as a secret ceremonial city. Two thousand feet above the rumbling Urubamba river, the cloud shrouded ruins have palaces, baths, temples, storage rooms and some 150 houses, all in a remarkable state of preservation. These structures, carved from the gray granite of the mountain top are wonders of both architectural and aesthetic genius. Many of the building blocks weigh 50 tons or more yet are so precisely sculpted and fitted together with such exactitude that the mortarless joints will not permit the insertion of even a thin knife blade. Little is known of the social or religious use of the site during Inca times. The skeletal remains of ten females to one male had led to the casual assumption that the site may have been a sanctuary for the training of priestesses and /or brides for the Inca nobility. However, subsequent osteological examination of the bones revealed an equal number of male bones, thereby indicating that Machu Picchu was not exclusively a temple or dwelling place of women.

One of Machu Picchu's primary functions was that of astronomical observatory. The Intihuatana stone (meaning 'Hitching Post of the Sun') has been shown to be a precise indicator of the date of the two equinoxes and other significant celestial periods. The Intihuatana (also called the Saywa or Sukhanka stone) is designed to hitch the sun at the two equinoxes, not at the solstice (as is stated in some tourist literature and new-age books). At midday on March 21st and September 21st, the sun stands almost directly above the pillar, creating no shadow at all. At this precise moment the sun "sits with all his might upon the pillar" and is for a moment "tied" to the rock. At these periods, the Incas held ceremonies at the stone in which they "tied the sun" to halt its northward movement in the sky. There is also an Intihuatana alignment with the December solstice (the summer solstice of the southern hemisphere), when at sunset the sun sinks behind Pumasillo (the Puma's claw), the most sacred mountain of the western Vilcabamba range, but the shrine itself is primarily equinoctial.

Shamanic legends say that when sensitive persons touch their foreheads to the stone, the Intihuatana opens one's vision to the spirit world (the author had such an experience, which is described in detail in Chapter one of Places of Peace and Power, on the web site, www.sacredsites.com). Intihuatana stones were the supremely sacred objects of the Inca people and were systematically searched for and destroyed by the Spaniards. When the Intihuatana stone was broken at an Inca shrine, the Inca believed that the deities of the place died or departed. The Spaniards never found Machu Picchu, even though they suspected its existence, thus the Intihuatana stone and its resident spirits remain in their original position. The mountain top sanctuary fell into disuse and was abandoned some forty years after the Spanish took Cuzco in 1533. Supply lines linking the many Inca social centers were disrupted and the great empire came to an end. The photograph shows the ruins of Machu Picchu in the foreground with the sacred peak of Wayna Picchu towering behind. Partway down the northern side of Wayna Picchu is the so-called "Temple of the Moon" inside a cavern. As with the ruins of Machu Picchu, there is no archaeological or iconographical evidence to substantiate the 'new-age' assumption that this cave was a goddess site.