ABSTRACT
No longer is Machu Picchu the best-kept secret place of the Incas, as it was during the European conquest of the sixteenth century. Since its ‘discovery’ by Hiram Bingham in 1911, the so-called ‘lost city of the Incas’, located in Cuzco province in the Southern Peruvian Andes, has become a World Heritage Site and a major tourist destination that keeps stirring the imagination of the world (see Arellano 1997). As a result of growing foreign interest in Inca civilization, and for other historical reasons (see Flores Galindo 1987), Peru has branded itself as the ‘Land of the Incas’ and made the promotion of the tourist industry a priority for the country’s economic and cultural development.1
