Vilcabamba or Willkapampa is often called the Lost City of the Incas. Vilcabamba means "sacred plain" in Quechua. The modern name for the Inca ruins of Vilcabamba is Espíritu Pampa. Vilcabamba is located in Echarate District of La Convención Province in the Cuzco Region of Peru.
Ruins of Espíritu Pampa
Hiram Bingham III (upper right) with a local guide on a jungle bridge at Vilcabamba, hand-colored glass slide, 1911
Edmundo Guillén and Elżbieta Dzikowska in the ruins of Vilcabamba, photo taken by Tony Halik in 1976
Tree over structure
A lost city is an urban settlement that fell into terminal decline and became extensively or completely uninhabited, with the consequence that the site's former significance was no longer known to the wider world. The locations of many lost cities have been forgotten, but some have been rediscovered and studied extensively by scientists. Recently abandoned cities or cities whose location was never in question might be referred to as ruins or ghost towns. Smaller settlements may be referred to as abandoned villages. The search for such lost cities by European explorers and adventurers in Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia from the 15th century onwards eventually led to the development of archaeology.
Hiram Bingham rediscovered the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911, preceded by Agustín Lizárraga in 1902
Ruins of Ciudad Perdida, a city built by the Tayrona in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia
Angkor was rediscovered by Henri Mouhot in 1860.