In 1911, Hiram Bingham was a young scholar specialising in modern Latin American history at Yale University. He was 36-years-old, married to Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany diamond empire, they had six children and lived in a thirty-roomed mansion on top of a hill. Bingham was a man who seemed to have all the comforts of life, but he was restless and driven. During a field trip to Peru in 1909, he was invited by his guide to see an ancient Inca site high up in the Andes Mountains. This set him on a path that would change his life forever. Bingham learned how in the sixteenth century, the great Inca Empire fled from the ferocious onslaught of Spanish Conquistadors and built a last stronghold deep inside the Amazon jungle. A place they named Vilcabamba. There, they made their final stand against their ruthless enemy, but with their death, the memory of where this last refuge was, disappeared.
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