The Choquequirao trek to the lost city

Few archaeological sites in the world have endured five centuries of silence and emerged again so quietly. Choquequirao does not announce itself. It is not visible from any road, no train climbs to its terraces, no airport bears its name. To reach it, you must take the Choquequirao trek — and the walk itself is part of what the site asks of you.

A brief chronicle

Built during the reign of the ninth Sapa Inca, Pachacuti (c. 1438 – 1471), and expanded under his son Túpac Yupanqui, Choquequirao occupies a ridge between two sacred peaks: Salkantay and Qoriwayrachina. It was, by all accounts, an estate of the imperial lineage — part royal retreat, part ceremonial complex, part frontier outpost overlooking the road into the Vilcabamba.

When the Spanish reached Cusco in 1533, Choquequirao did not fall immediately. Its remote position made it one of the strongholds of the so-called Neo-Inca State, the resistance that retreated into Vilcabamba and fought the colonial conquest for another forty years. By the time Vilcabamba finally fell in 1572, Choquequirao had already begun its long silence. The cloud forest reclaimed it. The terraces grew over. The roads — the great Qhapaq Ñan — washed away in the rains.

“What the Spanish chroniclers did not see, the Apurímac kept hidden for four hundred years. Choquequirao is a city the empire never lost — only forgot, and then remembered.” — from our Journal

Rediscovery

Eighteenth-century chroniclers — among them the Spanish priest Cosme Bueno (1768) — referenced a place called “Choquequirao,” though without precise location. In the nineteenth century, French explorer Eugène de Sartiges (1834) reached the ruins and produced the first known sketches. Decades later, the American explorer Hiram Bingham — the man who would later make Machu Picchu world-famous — visited the site in 1909, two years before his more celebrated discovery.

Yet Choquequirao remained largely unstudied for most of the twentieth century. 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 between thirty and forty percent of Choquequirao has been excavated. The rest waits, beneath roots and stones, in the patience of mountains.

Architecture and sacred geography

Choquequirao unfolds across a series of plazas, terraces, ceremonial precincts, and residential platforms — all carved into the contours of the mountain itself. To walk the site is to follow the Inca conception of duality: hanan and hurin, upper and lower, sun and earth, masculine and feminine.

The site’s most distinctive feature — and the one that has no equivalent at Machu Picchu — is the group of agricultural terraces decorated with white stone figures of llamas. Twenty-four such figures have been identified to date, embedded into the walls of two parallel terrace systems. Their function remains debated: were they offerings? Celestial markers? Tributes to the herds that sustained the empire?

Other notable structures include:

• The Main Plaza (Plaza Principal) — the ceremonial heart of the upper city, flanked by ritual structures.
• The Usnu — a truncated pyramid platform aligned with the sacred mountains, where ceremonies were conducted.
• The Priest’s House (Casa del Sacerdote) — a fine masonry building near the main plaza.
• The Hanan and Hurin sectors — the dual residential complexes, separated by elevation and orientation.
• The agricultural sector — extensive terraces still in use today by local farmers for maize, potatoes and quinoa.

Why take the Choquequirao trek

There are quicker ways to see ancient Peru. A train carries thousands daily to Machu Picchu. A bus drops travelers at Ollantaytambo. A jeep climbs to Sacsayhuamán. The Choquequirao trek asks for something different. It asks for your feet, your patience, and your willingness to descend before you can rise.

Some travelers come for the solitude — the simple fact that you may walk for an entire morning and meet no one. Others come for the archaeology — to see ruins not behind ropes, not crowded with selfie sticks, but in the quiet authority of their own scale. Still others come for the Apurímac itself — the “Speaking God” in Quechua, the river that runs eighteen hundred meters below the citadel and gives its voice to the entire canyon.

Whatever the reason, the trail is the same. The descent is steep, the climb on the other side is steeper, and the silence — once you are in it — is unlike any other we have walked.