The history of Choquequirao

Long before the Choquequirao trek existed as a tourist route, Choquequirao was something else: a royal estate of the Inca empire, a frontier outpost, a refuge of the resistance, and — for four centuries — a lost city. This is its story, told as honestly as the archaeology allows.

Origin: Pachacuti and the Inca expansion

Choquequirao was built during the reign of the ninth Sapa Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (c. 1438–1471), the same emperor who is credited with founding Machu Picchu and reshaping Cusco into the imperial capital. Pachacuti was a builder of the highest ambition. Under his rule, the Inca empire expanded from a small Andean kingdom into the largest pre-Columbian state in the Americas.

Choquequirao occupies a ridge between two sacred peaks — Salkantay and Qoriwayrachina — overlooking the Apurímac river canyon. The location was not accidental. The site was an estate of the imperial lineage, part royal retreat, part ceremonial complex, and crucially, a frontier outpost controlling the road into the Vilcabamba region. Expansion was completed under Pachacuti’s son, Túpac Yupanqui (c. 1471–1493).

The architecture of duality

The history of Choquequirao is written in its stones. The site unfolds across a series of plazas, terraces, ceremonial precincts, and residential platforms — all organized according to the Inca conception of duality: hanan and hurin, upper and lower, sun and earth, masculine and feminine. The same dual organization shaped Cusco itself.

Choquequirao’s most distinctive feature has no equivalent at Machu Picchu: the twenty-four white-stone llama figures embedded into the agricultural terraces. The figures were created by setting white granite stones into the darker stone walls, depicting llamas with their characteristic upright necks. Some are accompanied by what may be a herder figure. Their function remains debated. Were they offerings? Celestial markers? Tributes to the herds that sustained the empire? We may never know with certainty.

The Spanish conquest and the silence

When Francisco Pizarro reached Cusco in 1533, the Inca empire fractured. Most of the imperial cities fell quickly. But Choquequirao, hidden in the cloud forest above the Apurímac, did not.

Choquequirao became one of the strongholds of the Neo-Inca State — the resistance that retreated into Vilcabamba and continued to fight the Spanish for another forty years. The last Inca, Túpac Amaru I, was captured in Vilcabamba in 1572 and executed in Cusco. With his death, the Inca resistance ended. And so did Choquequirao’s active life.

Over the next two centuries, the cloud forest reclaimed the site. The terraces grew over with vegetation. The roads — the great Qhapaq Ñan — washed away in the rains. The memory of Choquequirao did not entirely vanish from local communities, but it disappeared from the official record. The lost city of the Incas had been lost.

The rediscovery

The first surviving reference to Choquequirao in colonial records comes from the Spanish priest Cosme Bueno in 1768, who described a place by that name without precise location. The first known visitor of the modern era was the French explorer Eugène de Sartiges (Comte d’Hautpoul), who reached the ruins in 1834 and produced the first known sketches.

The site was visited again in 1909 by the American explorer Hiram Bingham, two years before he would “discover” Machu Picchu in 1911. Bingham’s notes on Choquequirao were brief — he believed (incorrectly) that he had found the legendary lost city of Vilcabamba. He moved on quickly, looking for what he thought was a greater prize. History remembers his name for the wrong city.

For most of the twentieth century, Choquequirao remained largely unstudied. Only since the 1990s, with sustained Peruvian state archaeological campaigns, has the site begun to give up its secrets. As of today, archaeologists believe that only thirty to forty percent of Choquequirao has been excavated. The rest waits, beneath roots and stones, in the patience of mountains.

What we know — and what we don’t

The history of Choquequirao is, in many ways, still being written. Key questions remain unresolved:

• What was the population? Estimates range from a few hundred to several thousand at the height of the site’s use.
• What was the purpose of the llama figures? Religious? Agricultural? Astronomical?
• What is buried in the unexcavated 60–70%? Tombs? Storehouses? Ceremonial complexes?
• How was Choquequirao connected to Vilcabamba and to Machu Picchu through the road system?

Each new excavation campaign provides partial answers. Each answer raises new questions. Choquequirao, unlike Machu Picchu, is not a settled history but an active one.

Walking the history

When you walk the Choquequirao trek today, you walk a path that has been walked for at least six hundred years — by Inca administrators, by Spanish conquistadors hunting the resistance, by colonial-era priests like Cosme Bueno, by Sartiges with his sketchbook, by Bingham and his porters, and by twentieth-century archaeologists with their tools. Each generation has read the same stones differently. You will read them in your own way.

This is why we believe the Choquequirao trek is not, in the end, just a hike. It is a brief participation in a long conversation between the mountains and the people who walk them. The lost city is no longer entirely lost — but it is still, in the ways that matter, a place that earns its visitors. We are honored to walk it with you.