Word: incas
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...archaeologists in Peru, that hidden something has always been the lost city of Vilcabamba, the last great capital of the Incas. As described in the 16th century chronicles, Vilcabamba was believed located somewhere in the southern Peruvian Andes. There, for nearly four decades, some 4,000 Indians lived, waged sporadic war on the Spaniards, and built great palaces and temples. Then in 1572, after the Spanish killed the last Inca ruler, the Indians apparently deserted their capital, and Vilcabamba disappeared beneath the jungle...
Strangers Beware. The expedition leader was Gene Savoy, a 37-year-old explorer from Portland, Ore. For five years, Savoy has been tramping the Peruvian Andes, turning up everything from three pre-Inca cities to a 100-ft.-wide pre-Inca highway. In 1963 he joined forces with Peruvian Explorer Antonio Santander Cascelli, 62, and together they started hunting for Vilcabamba. Old records seemed to point to a forbidding area northwest of Machu Picchu, called the Plain of the Spirits...
...first plateau, Savoy and Santander found a luxurious palace and at least 16 separate communities-built mostly of granite and limestone, and complete with fountains, gardens, courtyards, large terraced dwellings apparently used by Inca nobles, and 100 or so squat circular huts that probably housed lower-class Indians. True to archaeological expectations, a strong Spanish influence was evident-the result, old records suggest, of seven Spanish turncoats who came to live in the Inca capital. In the palace were two rooms with a Spanish-style connecting doorway rather than the single courtyard entryway that typifies pure Incan architecture. Savoy also...
...avaricious Spaniards, gold was simply rare and therefore of monetary value; when a nation had enough, it became rich. The Indians were astonished at this attitude, and surmised that the white men had some physical disease that could only be cured by gold. The Inca Emperor Atahualpa had to ransom himself from the swinish Spanish Adventurer Pizarro with a roomful of the stuff-13,000 lbs., all told. (For his pains, Atahualpa was strangled.) Indifferently, the Spaniards melted art into bullion; their pillage increased Europe's gold supply by 20%, part of which went to finance the ill-fated...
...well. Peru has one of Latin America's most solid currencies (26.60 soles to the dollar) and a rapidly expanding industry (copper, manufacturing, fishing). The problem is to spread some of the soles around. In the highlands, 6,000,000 Indians still speak the language of their Inca ancestors, earn a bare $15 per family per year; city slum dwellers do little better. But Belaúnde's government has already built 2,200 low-cost housing units in Lima. He has pushed through a new universal-education law that will take a long time to implement...