The road to Machu Picchu

Peru is a poor man sitting on a throne of gold,’ says my guide Julia. I’m not entirely sure what she means but certainly, as we walk around Lima’s Plaza de Armas, there does seem to be a lot of gold. Most of it is to be found on altars in the Monastery of San Francisco and around the portraits of martyred saints in the cathedral.

Plaza de Armas was the centre of the old Inca coastal settlement of Limaq. When the conquistador Pizarro seized the city in 1535, he demolished the Inca palaces and temples around the square and divided the land between his supporters. One of these was Jerónimo de Aliaga, whose descendants know Julia well. She takes me into their house, a double-fronted casa they built on a former Inca altar next to Pizarro’s mansion. Sixteen generations of Aliagas have lived in the labyrinthine house with its open-air first-floor patio (it hardly ever rains in Lima) and statue of Christopher Columbus. The walls are lined with family portraits and religious icons.

Julia and I discuss the way in which so much of Lima rises up on the street plans of pre-conquest Limaq when we go round the corner to El Cordano, a dark coffee shop that has seen no need to redecorate for decades. Normally it’s crowded with journalists and politicians but not today. Today is Sunday. ‘The Spanish brought Roman Catholicism with them,’ says Julia, ‘and it stayed. We are a very religious country.’

This point is brought home to me the next day when I fly up to Cusco in the Andes. Cusco was the Inca capital until 1533, when Pizarro’s troops seized it after garrotting Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor. Cusco is 11,000 feet above sea level, a busy city with a baroque square at its centre fronting one of the largest cathedrals in South America.

The altitude has given me a headache. Manuella, my new guide, thinks a beatific picture of the Virgin Mary might help. ‘For the Incas it was very easy to turn to worshipping the kindly Virgin Mary because she was Pachamama to them — Mother Earth.’ The portrait is an example of ‘transitional’ art — Christian symbolism rendered by Inca converts. Already I’d seen Jesus crucified in what looked like a string vest (Inca artists were quite prudish about their gods) and a Last Supper where the disciples are feasting on roast guinea pig.

The next day, after some fortifying gulps from an oxygen cylinder at my hotel, the Palacio Nazarenas, Manuella takes me to the studio of Antonio Olave, a Gran Maestro de la Artesanía Peruana Patrimonio Cultural Vivo de la Nación, which means he is a living piece of Peruvian heritage. He and his team turn out plaster baby Jesuses and archangels and reproduction Killke ceramics — spouted drinking vessels created by the civilisation that preceded the Incas in Cusco.

The last part of my journey is to Machu Picchu. We travel down the Sacred Valley on the Hiram Bingham, a train operated by Orient-Express, remarkably like the one that runs between Venice and Istanbul. The journey is graciously slow, a mariachi band plays in the observation car and unlimited supplies of Peruvian wine are available with lunch. Machu Picchu was designed by the Incas to be inaccessible; today the most direct routes from Cusco are the four-day hike over the mountainous Inca Trail, and the train.

At Aguas Calientes the train stops and our party of well-heeled travellers joins the backpackers to clamber aboard buses for the 30-minute drive up hairpin bends to Machu Picchu itself. The abandoned city does not disappoint, a bowling green beneath a huge lozenge-shaped mountain, surrounded by little houses. The place is overrun with guides speaking in many languages. The Inca settlement is beautiful, as much for its roofless buildings as for its stunning location rising up out of the dense forest. I find a rock and sit tracing the streets below me and listening to the calls of the forest birds. I see llamas grazing skittishly on the lawns below and hear waterfalls cascade down hundreds of feet to the Urubamba River.

After a night at the nearby lodge I’m up at 6am to see the sun rise over Putukusi, one of the many sacred mountains, as it illuminates this mysterious citadel, abandoned to the jungle as soon as the Incas heard that Atahualpa had been defeated by Pizarro at the Battle of Cajamarca. That we know so little of its history only adds to Machu Picchu’s appeal.

If Peru is a poor man sitting on a throne of gold, he is also sitting on layer upon layer of history, one civilisation literally building on top of the previous one and none of them entirely knowable. ES