The Last Days of the Incas

The Last Days of the Incas is among the most powerful and important accounts of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, of the modern search for the Incas’ lost Amazonian capital of Vilcabamba, and of the discovery of Machu Picchu. In 1911 an American historian from Yale University, Hiram Bingham, stumbled upon a spectacular set of Inca ruins called Machu Picchu, set high upon a ridge in the cloud forest of Peru. Bingham had been searching for a lost Inca city called Vilcabamba—a legendary capital in the Amazon rainforest from which the Incas had conducted a nearly four-decades-long guerrilla war. Spanish renegades had taught the Incas how to ride European horses and to use European weapons and guns and the Incas nearly succeeded in wiping Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors out. But was Machu Picchu really the Incas’ long lost guerrilla capital? Or did Vilcabamba still lie somewhere in the jungle—a lost Inca city waiting to be discovered?