The Spanish never found Machu Picchu.

1450 · 1911 · apart: 461 years

The Incas built it around 1450 and left within a century, and it won world fame only in 1911, when Hiram Bingham was guided there.

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The event

• Building of Machu Picchuc. 1450 · Machu Picchu, Peru. High in the Andes an estate of precisely fitted stone was built for the Inca ruler Pachacuti. The Spanish never found it, and after Hiram Bingham publicised it in 1911 it became the symbol of Inca civilisation.

15th century · 20th century

More amazing facts

• 1450 · 1564 Ivan Fyodorov's Apostol (1564), the first precisely dated Russian printed book, came out more than a century after Gutenberg's press.
• 1450 Machu Picchu and Gutenberg's press are the same age: around 1450 the Incas were building their mountain estate while Mainz printed its first books.
• 1450 · 1453 When Constantinople fell in 1453, Gutenberg was already printing in Mainz: the last Roman Empire vanished in the first years of the printed book.
• 1450 · 1455 The inventor of printing lost his press in court.
• 1450 · 1729 The first Ottoman Turkish book printed in Arabic script appeared almost 280 years after Gutenberg: a dictionary published by Ibrahim Müteferrika in Istanbul in 1729.
• 1450 · 1671 The legend of Kaldi the goatherd, whose goats perked up after eating coffee berries, was first written down only in 1671.

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