What is Machu Picchu?

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About Machu Picchu:

It is a 15th-century Inca site.
Location: Machu Picchu is located 50 miles (80 km) northwest of Cuzco, Peru, in the Cordillera de Vilcabamba of the Andes Mountains.
Machu Picchu is believed to have been built by Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, the ninth ruler of the Inca, in the mid-1400s.
It is made up of temples, palaces, terraces, monuments, complexes and walls.
The city is divided into a lower and upper part, separating the farming from residential areas, with a large square between the two.
Machu Picchu was abandoned when the Inca Empire was conquered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century.
Machu Picchu was rediscovered in 1911 by the American explorer Hiram Bingham.
It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1983.

What is the Inca Civilization?

Inca Civilization flourished in ancient Peru between c. 1400 and 1533 CE.
It is the largest empire ever seen in the Americas and the largest in the world at that time.
Inca society was highly stratified.
The emperor ruled with the aid of an aristocratic bureaucracy.
Inca technology and architecture were highly developed.
Their economy was based on agriculture.
The Inca religion combined features of animism, fetishism, and the worship of nature gods.
The Inca language Quechua is still spoken by around eight million people in the world.
The descendants of the Inca are the present-day Quechua-speaking peasants of the Andes, who constitute around 45 percent of the population of Peru.

Q1) What is a UNESCO World Heritage site?

World Heritage site is recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). These sites are cultural and/or natural sites of ‘Outstanding Universal Value’, which are important across countries and generations.

Source: Peru closes Machu Picchu as anti-government protests grow