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Vilcabamba, Peru
Vilcabamba was a city founded by Manco Inca in 1539 and was the last refuge of the Inca Empire until it fell to the Spaniards in 1572, signalling the end of Inca resistance to Spanish rule.
History
After the Incan empire fell, the city was burned and the area swiftly became a remote backwater of Peru. The location of Vilcabamba was forgotten.
The ruins of the city were rediscovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911 in a remote forest site 130 km west of Cuzco called Espiritu Pampa, but he failed to realize its significance, preferring to believe that Machu Picchu, which he also rediscovered, was the fabled "Lost City of the Incas". It wasn't until the explorations and discoveries of Antonio Santander and Gene Savoy in the 1960s, however, that many came to see this site at Espiritu Pampa as the real Vilcabamba of legend.
In 1976 Prof. Edmundo Guillen and Polish explorers Tony Halik and Elzbieta Dzikowska again found the ruins. However, before the expedition in a museum in Seville Guillen discovered letters from Spaniards, in which they were describing the progress of the invasion and what they found in Vilcabamba. Comparison between the letters' content and the ruins provided additional proof of the location of Vilcabamba.
Later archeological work by Vincent Lee and research by John Hemming gave further confirmation that Espiritu Pampa was generally accepted as the historical Vilcabamba.
On 16 June 2006 in a museum in Cuzco a plaque that commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the Vilcabamba discovery has been unveiled. Among others there are the names of the "first proof expedition": Guillen, Halik and Dzikowska.
In popular culture
The lost city of Vilcabamba features in the educational computer game series The Amazon Trail, the Tomb Raider video game and its remake [[Tomb Raider: Anniversary]], and the book Evil Star by Anthony Horowitz. Vilcabamba is also a playable level in the Playstation 2
role-playing game [[Shadow Hearts: From the New World]].
The city was the location of British writer Colin Thubron's 2002 novel, To the Last City (2002). It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and tells the story of a group of people who set off to explore the ruins of the Inca city in what has been described as a "Heart of Darkness narrative" in a "Marquezian setting".
See also
Spanish conquest of Peru
Tupac Amaru
Amazon Trail
Tomb Raider
Sources
Deyermenjian, Gregory (1985) "Vilcabamba Revisited" in South American Explorer, No. 12.
Hemming, John (1970) The Conquest of the Incas.
Lee, Vincent (2000) Forgotten Vilcabamba.
Santander Casselli, Antonio (no date) "Vilcabamba" in Andanzas de un Sonador.
Savoy, Gene (1970) Antisuyu: The Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Vilcabamba, Peru
