Vilcabamba, Peru
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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. The city was burned and the area swiftly became a remote backwater of Peru. The location of Vilcabamba was forgotten. The lost city of Vilcabamba features in the educational computer game series the Amazon Trail, the Tomb Raider computer game and also the book 'evil star' by Anthony Horowitz.
The ruins of the city were rediscovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911 in a remote forest site 130km west of Cuzco called Espíritu 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 and later archeological work by Vincent Lee and research by John Hemming that Espíritu Pampa was generally accepted as the historical Vilcabamba.
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