Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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Sacsayhuamán

added28 August 2026

An Inca fortress above Cusco, built from multi-tonne blocks fitted together without mortar so tightly that a knife blade will not pass between them. How they were shaped and lifted is still debated.

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-13.50778, -71.98222

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Machu Picchu

An Inca city on the saddle between two peaks at eight thousand feet, built around 1450 and abandoned perhaps a century later — probably to smallpox, which arrived ahead of the Spaniards themselves. The conquistadors never reached it and never learned it was there. The stones are fitted without mortar so closely that a knife blade will not go between them, and the Intihuatana, a carved pillar, casts almost no shadow at the solstices.

72 km away

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Nazca Lines

Giant geoglyphs etched into the desert of southern Peru more than 1,500 years ago. The animal figures and geometric patterns are only fully legible from the air — their purpose is still unresolved.

366 km away

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Nazca and the Three-Fingered Mummies

Since 2017 Jaime Maussan has been exhibiting small pale bodies with elongated skulls and three fingers on each hand, said to come from a cave near Nazca — and in 2023 he exhibited them to the Mexican congress. Peruvian prosecutors seized part of the collection and in 2018 published a forensic report led by Flavio Estrada: dolls assembled from human and animal bones held together with modern adhesive, with animal skulls standing in for human ones. Peru's college of archaeologists and its ministry of culture demanded an investigation. The bodies are still on the conference circuit.

369 km away

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