Machu Picchu Trivia
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55 free Machu Picchu trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Machu Picchu sits on a ridge 2,430 metres up in the Peruvian Andes, was built for the Inca emperor Pachacuti around the 1450s, was abandoned within about eighty years and stayed hidden under jungle until the early twentieth century. This quiz covers the site from every angle: what the Quechua name means, who lived and worked there, why the walls have no mortar and lean inwards, what the Intihuatana and the Temple of the Sun were for, the local farmer and the Peruvian explorer who reached it before Hiram Bingham, the 1911 Yale expedition, the century-long fight over the artefacts, and modern life at the site from visitor caps to the New Seven Wonders vote. Easy questions ask which country it is in and which civilisation built it; harder ones cover the peak that may have been its original name, the earthquake faults under the terraces, the bismuth-bronze knives, and the one day in 1925 that Bingham spent as Governor of Connecticut. It suits travellers planning the trip, history and geography students, and quiz setters who want a world-heritage round with real detail. Fans of the wider empire will also find our Inca Empire quiz. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Machu Picchu, Hiram Bingham, Huayna Picchu, the Inca Trail and related topics, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 55 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Machu Picchu is located in which South American country?
Peru
Peru holds the ruins on the eastern slopes of its Andes, where the mountains drop toward the Amazon, so they stand in tropical mountain forest; they are the country's most visited attraction.
Q 02How do most visitors reach Aguas Calientes, the town at the foot of Machu Picchu?
By train
By train: no road reaches Aguas Calientes, so almost every visitor rides the rails through the river gorge and the rest arrive on foot.
Q 03What originally covered the roofs of Machu Picchu's stone buildings?
Thatched grass
Thatched grass: roofs of wood and thatch once topped the walls, and when they perished only the roofless stone shells were left.
Q 04Which river loops around Machu Picchu on three sides, far below the ridge?
The Urubamba
The Urubamba, still revered as a sacred river, nearly encircles the ridge; some scholars think that embrace is part of why the Incas chose the spot.
Q 05What does the name Machu Picchu mean in Quechua?
Old peak
Old peak is the usual translation: machu means 'old' or 'old man' and pikchu 'peak'; a 2021 study argues the Incas themselves knew the town by another name, one meaning 'young peak'.
Q 06Which Inca emperor, who launched the empire's great expansion in the mid-1400s, is believed to have had Machu Picchu built?
Pachacuti
Pachacuti seized power around 1438 and began the conquests that built the empire; the Incas left no writing, so the link to him rests on Spanish colonial documents and the site's dating.
Q 07What do most archaeologists now think Machu Picchu was built to be?
A seasonal royal retreat
A seasonal royal retreat: early theories made it a convent of chosen women or a fortress, but it has no real defences and the court seems to have used it for only part of the year.
Q 08A 2021 study found Machu Picchu was in use decades earlier than colonial records implied; which technique dated its skeletons?
Radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating of bones and teeth from 26 burials showed the site in use by about 1420, nearly two decades before the chronicles say its builder even took power.
Q 09Machu Picchu has only about 200 buildings; roughly how many people are thought to have lived there in its heyday?
About 750
About 750 is the usual estimate: the famed 'lost city' was closer to a village, staffed mostly by servants and at its fullest in the dry season.
Q 10What do studies of skeletal remains suggest about the people who lived at Machu Picchu?
Immigrants from many regions
Immigrants from many regions: DNA from more than 30 burials showed coastal, highland and Amazonian ancestry, because the staff were servants drawn from lands the empire had conquered.
Q 11Which animals account for most of the animal bones found at Machu Picchu?
Llamas and alpacas
Llamas and alpacas belong to the high grasslands far above the forested ridge, so the herds, or their meat and hides, must have been brought down to the site.
Q 12Machu Picchu's stepped farming terraces are known by which Spanish word?
Andenes
Andenes is Spanish, not an Inca word: an andén is also a railway platform, and in the Andes it came to mean the stepped fields that still hold the mountainside in place.
Q 13Why were Machu Picchu's terraces engineered for drainage rather than irrigation?
Annual rainfall exceeds 1,800 mm
Q 21Which magazine made Machu Picchu world famous with Hiram Bingham's report in 1913?
National Geographic
National Geographic ran his account in 1913, and its parent society helped pay for the return expeditions that cleared and excavated the ruins.
Q 22A ceremonial Inca knife dug up at Machu Picchu in 1912 is the earliest known object made with which alloy?
Bismuth bronze
Bismuth bronze: the knife's handle is about 18 per cent bismuth, apparently the first time smiths added it to bronze on purpose, and it gave the casting an unusually pale colour.
Q 23Which American university kept thousands of Machu Picchu artefacts for nearly a century before agreeing to send them home?
Yale
Annual rainfall exceeds 1,800 mm, so each terrace was built as a filter, with topsoil over sandy gravel over stone chips, letting the downpours sink away instead of washing the slope off.
Q 14A Machu Picchu temple takes its name from a carved rock shaped like which bird with outstretched wings?
The condor
The condor: the carved rock is read as the bird's head and the stones behind it as spread wings, and the temple is thought to have been a place of animal sacrifice.
Q 15Where did the 1912 excavators find most of Machu Picchu's dead?
In caves around the site's edge
In caves around the site's edge: some 174 people lay in shallow chambers under boulders and overhangs, and they are read as the site's servants, not its nobles.
Q 16What did Hiram Bingham find written on a Machu Picchu temple wall in 1911?
A name and '1902'
A name and '1902': a local man, Agustín Lizárraga, had climbed up with companions nine years before the 'discovery', and the writing is said to have been erased later on Bingham's orders.
Q 17Which Chilean poet wrote the long poem 'The Heights of Macchu Picchu'?
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda admired the stonework but gave his poem to the nameless labourers who raised it, calling on the dead builders to rise and speak through him.
Q 18Who led Hiram Bingham along the last stretch into Machu Picchu's ruins in July 1911?
A farmer's young son
A farmer's young son: two families were still farming the old terraces, and one of their boys, about eleven, walked the visitor along the ridge to the overgrown ruins.
Q 19What was Bingham's 1911 expedition primarily searching for?
The lost capital of the Neo-Inca state
The lost capital of the Neo-Inca state was Vilcabamba, where the last rulers held out for decades; he walked through its jungle-covered ruins that same year, dismissed them, and gave Machu Picchu the title instead.
Q 20Bingham compared his 'discovery' of Machu Picchu to whose 'discovery' of America?
Columbus
Columbus: in a 1922 letter he granted that others had reached the ruins first, as Norsemen had reached America, but argued that he was the one who made them known to the world.
Yale took the finds on condition that the government could ask for them back, then held on until a 2008 lawsuit, street protests in Lima and an appeal to President Obama; they are now in Cusco.
Q 24What career did Hiram Bingham take up after his Machu Picchu expeditions ended in 1915?
Politics
Politics: elected governor of Connecticut in 1924, he was sworn in and resigned the very next day, because in the meantime he had also won a seat in the US Senate.
Q 25What fed the chain of 16 stone fountains that stepped down through Machu Picchu?
A mountain spring
A mountain spring: a stone canal carried its water to the top of the town, where it fell from one fountain to the next, and flowing water seems to have been sacred to the Incas as well as useful.
Q 26The Intihuatana stone's name, probably applied by Bingham, means what in Quechua?
Place where the sun is tied
Place where the sun is tied: Bingham borrowed the name from similar carved rocks at other Inca sites, so it may not be what the Incas called this one, and what the rock was for is still argued over.
Q 27What is unusual about the main wall of Machu Picchu's Temple of the Sun?
It is curved
It is curved, a rarity in Inca building: the semicircular wall wraps around a natural boulder that may have served as an altar, much like the great sun temple in Cusco.
Q 28Which of these did the builders of Machu Picchu have to manage without?
The wheel
The wheel: the Incas raised the town with no wheels and no iron or steel tools, which is why the engineers who study its stonework today call it a marvel.
Q 29Why did Machu Picchu escape the looting and demolition invaders brought to other Inca sites?
They never found it
They never found it: no colonial chronicle describes the place, so its walls were still largely intact when outsiders finally arrived some four centuries later.
Q 30What is the characteristic shape of Inca doors and windows at Machu Picchu?
Trapezoidal
Trapezoidal openings, wider at the foot than the head, repeat the walls themselves, which lean inward as they rise; that slope and the interlocking blocks have carried the buildings through 500 years of earthquakes.