In 1572 the Spanish sacked Vilcabamba, the last Inca stronghold, and the city was rapidly overtaken by the jungle, receding for hundreds of years into legend and myth. This is the story of how Vilcabamba was founded and how the Incas held out against the Spanish for over 30 years in a savage guerrilla war. Hundreds of years later, at the turn of this century an American explorer, Hiram Bingham, stumbled on the ruins of Machu Pichu and announced to the world that he had found Vilcabamba, the lost city of the Incas.

For fifty years the academic world agreed with him until in 1967 another American explorer discovered the real Vilcabamba... This is the biography of a city - through history, myth, legend, literature, exploration and archaeology.