Landslide Threat At Machu Picchu?
A top preservation official denied that the ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu is facing an imminent collapse due to landslides, as Japanese researchers reportedly suggested last month.
Javier Lambarri, director of the National Institute of Culture in Cuzco, said Wednesday that the famous mountaintop ruins are "absolutely not" in immediate danger.
"We have a problem with landslides in certain sectors, which is normal. It happens every year when there is considerable rainfall. We know that there is a fault line that crosses the entire city and that could cause a problem," said Lambari.
Lambarri said a dozen seismic measurement devices are monitoring the ruins — which were declared a World Heritage site in 1983 by UNESCO — for signs of potential landslides 24 hours a day. "As of now, we have no report that there is an imminent danger," he said.
The Daily Yomiuri newspaper quotes the leader of a team of researchers from Japan's Kyoto University as saying last month that the ground underneath the 500-year-old stone city is moving at a rate of 0.4 inches per month, which is considered a precursor to a landslide.
Lambarri said the Kyoto researchers have been taking seismic measurements at Machu Picchu since last year, but that the Kyoto team had not passed on any information suggesting grave danger.
 AP Some 300,000 tourists each year visit Machu Picchu, which the Incas used as a refuge from the Spanish empire. |
Machu Picchu sits atop a craggy peak high in the jungle-covered southern Andes in Cuzco province, 310 miles southeast of the capital, Lima. The ruins are Peru's top tourist attraction, drawing 300,000 visitors a year.
The government, cultural heritage preservationists and environmentalists have been locked in a struggle for years over how best to handle the stewardship of the site, which was the last refuge of the Incas after their land was grabbed by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century.
Some Peruvians want the government to boost investment in the area and pave the dirt roads; that group blocked the train line to Machu Picchu last May to make its point.
The demonstration came only a few days after an ancient sundial in the ruins - the Intihuatana, the "hitching post of the sun" - was damaged during the making of a beer commercial produced by an American advertising agency.
Dynamite used for road construction in the area in 1995 as blamed for a landslide which is pointed to today by preservationists as evidence that the government should abandon plans to build a cable car and hotel complex to serve tourists at Machu Picchu.
Opponents of the controversial project say the vibrations from the construction and the operation of the cable car pose too great a risk to one of Peru's most precious treasures.
Concern about balancing the economic benefits of tourism with the risks to the area posed by too many visitors prompted the government last year to impose a limit on the number of hikers allowed on the Inca Trail.
No more than 500 people per day are allowed to walk the almost 30-mile long trail, which goes into the Andes Mountains and winds up at Machu Picchu.
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