It's remarkable that Machu Picchu was first brought to the attention of the world in 1911. The Spanish invaders at the time of the Conquest and during centuries of colonial rule never discover the city, and nobody ever led them there, suggesting that the site had long since been abandoned and forgotten.

It was Hiram Bingham, a Hawaiian man born on November 19, 1875 who did such a discovery. He had a good education, a B.A. degree from Yale University in 1898, a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1905 and then spent one year as a Preceptor at Princeton University.

In November 1906 Bingham sailed to South America to follow the route Bolivar did; one of the liberators of Latin America in its war against Spain he had studied. That was the first approach to what it will be one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century.

In December 1908, Bingham attended the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago, Chile. It was there that he decided to follow the old Spanish trade route from Buenos Aires to Lima and hence to Cusco. There Bingham met J.J. Nunez, prefect of the Apurimac region, who invited him on the arduous trip to the ruins of Choquequirao, thought at the time to be the site of Vilcabamba, the "last resting place of the Incas".

On his return to the USA, Bingham decided to organize another expedition to Peru. He arrived in Lima in June 1911 where he began to study the seventeenth-century chronicles of Antonio de la Calancha and Fernando de Montesinos. The writings of these two men first inspired Bingham to seek the last two capitals of the Incas, Vilcabamba and Vitcos. Then, Bingham returned to Cusco from where he journeyed on foot and by mule through the Urubamba Valley, and into the Urubamba gorge.

On July 23, Bingham and his party camped by the river at a place called Mandor Pampa, where they aroused the curiosity of Melchor Arteaga, a local farmer who leased the land there. Through Sergeant Carrasco, the policeman who was his guide and interpreter, Bingham learned from Arteaga that there were extensive ruins on top of the ridge opposite the camp, which Arteaga, in his native Quechua, called Machu Picchu, or "Old Mountain".

According to Bingham: "The morning of July 24th dawned in a cold drizzle. Arteaga shivered and seemed inclined to stay in his hut. I offered to pay him well if he showed me the ruins. He demurred and said it was too hard a climb for such a wet day. But when he found I was willing to pay him a sol, three or four times the ordinary daily wage, he finally agreed to go. When asked just where the ruins were, he pointed straight up to the top of the mountain. No one supposed that they would be particularly interesting, and no one cared to go with me".

Accompanied only by Sergeant Carrasco and Arteaga, Bingham left the camp. After a short while, the party crossed a bridge so unnerving that the intrepid explorer was reduced to crawling across it on his hands and knees. From the river they climbed a precipitous slope until they reached the ridge at around midday.

Here Bingham rested at a small hut where they enjoyed the hospitality of a group of countrymen. They told him that they had been living there for about four years and explained that they had found an extensive system of terraces on whose fertile soil they had decided to grow their crops. Bingham was then told that the ruins he sought were close by and he was given a guide, the 11-year old Pablito Alvarez, to lead him there.

Almost immediately, he was greeted by the sight of a broad sweep of ancient terraces. They numbered more than a hundred and had recently been cleared of forest and reactivated. Led by the boy, he re-entered the forest beyond the terraces. Here young Pablito began to reveal to Bingham a series of white granite walls which the historian immediately judged to be the finest examples of masonry that he had ever seen. They were in fact, the remains of what we call today the Royal Tomb, the Main Temple, and the Temple of the Three Windows.

According to Bingham, he had entered the marvelous canyon of the Urubamba below the Inca fortress. The road runs through a land of matchless charm. It has the majestic grandeur of the Canadian Rockies, as well as the startling beauty of the Nuuanu Pali near Honolulu, and the enchanting vistas of the Koolau Ditch Trail on Maui, in his native land. And he continues, "I know of no place in the world which can compare with it. Not only had it great snow peaks looming above the clouds more than two miles overhead; gigantic precipices of many-colored granite rising sheer for thousands of feet above the foaming, glistening, roaring rapids, it has also, in striking contrast, orchids and tree ferns, the delectable beauty of luxurious vegetation and the mysterious witchery of the jungle. One is drawn irresistibly onwards by ever-recurring surprises through a deep, winding gorge, twisting past overhanging cliffs of incredible height".

Other people saw and even lived at Machu Picchu before Hiram Bingham even set foot in Peru, but had neither the means nor the opportunity to bring the "lost city" to the attention of the outside world. Bingham himself found two families living at the ruins.

He did not stay long at Machu Picchu because he felt that he could still find the capital city of Vitcos, which was supposed to be marked by a white boulder over a spring of water. At Huadquiña Bingham learned of "important ruins" a few days' journey down the Urubamba River. On August 8, 1911, he was lead to a white boulder and, some distance away, a spring. Bingham followed the stream to an open spot where he saw what he had been looking for--a gigantic white boulder with Inca carvings on its side overlooking a pool near the ruins of an Inca temple. Bingham had found Vitcos.

Bingham led expeditions back to the Vilcabamba region in 1912 and 1915, to clear the ruins he had discovered and to make further explorations and scientific studies in the area. These expeditions found many small Inca ruins in the hills near Machu Picchu, and traces of Inca roads and buildings at various places along the mountain range. As a result of these expeditions, Bingham became more and more convinced that Machu Picchu was the lost city of Vilcabamba and supported this view until his death.

Following the 1915 expedition, Bingham made no further trips to South America. He volunteered to serve in World War I and became the chief of air personnel in the air service after learning how to fly. He then entered Republican politics and was elected lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1922. He ran for governor in 1924 and won that race as well.