On one Sunday of October 2015, the Prime Ministers of Peru and Italy were visiting Machu Picchu and Adine Gavazzi, together with José Bastante, José Bastante, the head of the Archaeological Park of Machu Picchu, was asked to accompany them on a helicopter flight to view the site. This was permitted because requested on behalf of Fernando Astete, as helicopters are usually forbidden from flying in Machu Picchu, as they tend to scare animals. The journey began and Adine vividly recalls how she got her camera ready and took a picture for every second that she was up in the air. According to Adine, she was trying to see if there was a visual connection between Mountain Machu Picchu and Salkantay, a big glacier to the south of the site.

The Machu Picchu mountain corresponds to the very last geological outpost of the glacier. In fact, it is geologically connected to Salkantay and the Inca knew that. Adine had wanted to verify this fact and also understand if the visual line that connects the tip of Machu Picchu to the tip of the Wayna Picchu was the same as the line that connects the Salkantay to Machu Picchu. It was only recently, however, that she made a connection between one of the images that she took that day and one that had been taken by Fernando Astete thirty years before. Adine was ecstatic.

“While I was going through Fernando’s pictures, incredibly I found the same picture, except for the fact that his was much better, because the day I took the picture it was clouded, so you couldn’t see the Salkantay. You could see the axis connecting Machu Picchu and Wayna Picchu but you couldn’t see the Salkantay. Fernando had taken exactly the same picture thirty years before, exactly in the same spot. And the most incredible thing is that, how can you do it when you’re on a helicopter? I didn’t even know Fernando had taken the picture. So there is something very special in the story of that photo. Thirty years later I got the exact same picture in the air with the helicopter. What’s amazing is that, there you can be ten meters right or left, or even up or down and the picture would turn out different. But I took exactly the same picture and it’s truly extraordinary.”

Adine believes that the most likely explanation to this coincidence was that they were both looking for the same thing, with their eyes looking in the same direction. Adine was able to pass through the same location that Fernando had traveled by with the helicopter thirty years back. What was even more astonishing is that they both inclined the camera to be able to see the exact flat surface of the open square. According to Adine, in order to be able to capture that scenery, one must incline the camera in a certain way. It is an incredible coincidence indeed.

This is something Adine would have never discovered if she had not gone through and classified Fernando’s photos for this project. This account becomes even more significant as it tells a story far deeper than just a mere coincidence. In fact, it shows Inca’s and Fernando’s way of looking at the mountains. He was looking for one of those visual lines that the Inca were observing when they would go on top of the mountains before planning a city, an urban area, or a Yakhta. The incredible thing is that this coincidence is proof that it still works like that to this day. It is an element of the living culture that still exists. Adine learnt it from the workers. Even though she had learnt about this process from chronicles, she could not understand it properly.

This river was channeled in Inca times and definitely left its mark. The path starts from Aqokqasa hill, and right above the road, the site of Tunasmoqo can be seen. 

This particular image is really interesting, as it clearly shows the original movement/route of the river. Over time, the river bed was moved by the Incas, so that they could use the remaining surface for blossoming vegetation and growing their food. The river bed was designed to create a special type of environment and to allow for the growth of plants, while also being able to design terraces. This can clearly be seen on the left side of this picture, which is truly significant as far as landscape planning goes. On the right side of the image, however, the terraces have different levels.

In order for viewers to better visualize the initial direction of the river, Adine explained: 

“You can see the river, which runs straight, but you also see, on both the right and left sides, a sort of curve. It’s as if you were looking at a bottle shape and the water was running in the middle. The round part of the water flow is an artificial modification made by the Incas. It is not natural. What is natural in the picture above is what is seen on the top of the frame. The river moves right-left, right-left, and then it goes right. It is kind of more disturbed. That is the river that was not modified. In fact, the rest is a landscape design, as the entire area was altered by the Incas.”

When asked about the possible reasons for all the modifications, Adine explained that there could not be a single answer. For example, why would the Inca make alterations to this particular area and not somewhere else? There are, in fact, a variety of reasons that lead to landscape design. First and foremost, the amount of surface available. Because this is a  mountainous environment, the optimal goal is to search for a flat surface. Therefore, whenever the Incas would find a flat surface, they would use it and if they could not find one, they would then create a new one. The main reason for this is that the Inca liked to have very flat terraces, and this is just because their way of modifying the environment had a very strong aesthetic value to them. According to Adine:

“They would never do something that was visually counter-intuitive or that would look strange to the eyes. This is why we don’t immediately see the modification of the landscape.” 

For someone from the Andean culture, or even just from Peru, modifications are easily distinguishable. However, for a Western individual, the change is not easy to point out, no matter how obvious. Using this picture by Fernando Astete as an example, Adine explained:

“Look how straight the river is at its lowest part, and the look at the upper part, notice how uneven the river is. So the upper part is natural whereas the lower part is modified. You know this because the behavior of the river is not naturally like that. However, it is not the natural flow of the river that’s changed, it’s somebody else who has altered it. In this case, the Inca.”

An Inca could notice modifications right away. Even today, a student from Cusco who’s never dived into this question could see it immediately. Even a little kid could show it, without even knowing the word landscape. 

These images show the southern area of ​​the Ushnu. While today this part of the site presents a lot of vegetation, it is clear that this construction had not been completed by the Inca, as during excavations it lost much of its visibility.  

One of the images portrays the specific shadow relationship between the Huchuypicchu and Huaynapicchu. The big terrace seen in the image looks quite disordered, since the work on its construction was left unfinished. All these parts are usually covered by vegetation in most images of the Ushnu, which literally translates into “throne” and was a place where the Inca used to sit, do administrative work, and receive people. It was usually in the main square, but in this case, since there was no available space, it was put on the edge of the area. However, it still has a special connection to the Wanka, which was originally in the middle square, but cannot be seen today. A very interesting fact is that there is not a lot of vegetation surrounding it and that all the buildings of the Wayna Picchu are visible. In fact, this is because the image was taken right after an extensive fire.

Understanding the architecture of Machu Picchu means understanding its relevance to the sun and the shadows it creates over the buildings of the sanctuary. In this image, the Huchuy Picchu is shown, reflecting very low on the illuminated facade of the Wayna Picchu, meaning that the sun behind the Huchuy Picchu was lowering, but was still very high, as the shadow is not as high to cover most of the site’s facade. Therefore, the sunset was just about to begin in this picture. When asked if it would be possible to climb up the Wayna Picchu, Adine Gavazzi confirmed.

“Oh yes, there is a special time to go there. Very, very beautiful,very powerful, and very dangerous as well. Tourists are allowed to go, but a very reduced number of tourists, and they have to be visually controlled by the Hilantes, because in many parts, you can fall. If you fall from there, there is no possibility that you will survive the fall from the Wayna Picchu. More than three hundred people have died since we know Machu Picchu. Three hundred is a big number, I mean, Machu Picchu has been open to the public for only the last hundred years and we have three hundred people who died. That’s like three people each year. It’s scary. The most dangerous thing to do is hiking up the Wayna Picchu and so everybody wants to do that.”

This image of mount Yanatin was taken in front of the site’s keep, probably sometime during August.

This specific skyline is very special and much appreciated all over the world. In fact, it is used in pictures anywhere, from advertising materials to mere websites, and so on. One interesting reason why it is so special is that all workers of Machu Picchu can tell the exact date that the picture was taken on, only by looking at the sky. By using the skyline, the workers can determine exactly the day and the year, as the sun goes along the skyline like a clock, between one limit to the other limit, almost “oscillating” from one side to the other.

Another reason why this picture is so unique is that the skyline is never straight. It has a hundred thousand very small points, making it very easy to measure the position of the rising sun. So whenever there are not any clouds, which is at least seventy to eighty percent of days in a year, all the workers can tell the date, which is determined only by looking at the area to the east.

Outstanding in the archaeological site are the bastions of Saqsqahuamán and the Suchuna area, connected through the central opening in space of the park.

This image of Saqsahuamán, taken by Fernando Astete, shows the trace of the city of Cusco at the top of the picture, right above the first mount, surrounded by a zigzag wall. This is the only part of the bastions that is usually considered and appreciated when publishing. However, Saqsahuamán is way bigger because the parts that can be seen at the bottom of the picture are also a part of it. The bigger round part at the bottom is known to be a public area, which originally served as a water reservoir and became a sacred artificial lake, made and used by the Incas. It was also used for water distribution around the city of Cusco.

This image, in fact, is a very important picture, not only because of what it shows, but also because of its significance.

For example, as Adine Gavazzi, a Swiss architect specialized in anthropology of the Andes and the Amazon, explained: 

“In the middle of the picture you have the open square, which is empty. This is exactly like what happens in Machu Picchu: an empty something in the middle, a mount with zigzags on one side, which is the Hanan area, the Hurin area on the other side, with zigzag walls representing the male area and the empty zones representing the female area.”