Abstract

JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE 2020, VOL. 18, NO. 5, 606–610 BOOK REVIEWS Framing a Lost City – science, photography and the making of Machu Picchu,by Amy Cox Hall, Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 2017, xvii+267 pp., $29.95 (hardcover), ISBN-978-1-4773-13-68-8 Machu Picchu was discovered in 1911 by Yale University’s adjunct professor Hiram Bingham. In 1983 UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site. In 2007 it was voted as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. But more than these classifications, what truly testifies to the icon quality of Machu Picchu is the number of visitors per year: from the low 100,000s in the 1980s, to a peak of nearly 1.2 million tourists in 2013 – a 700% increase in roughly 30 years that, by 2011, forced the Peruvian government to limit the number of tourists per day. Today, only 2500 visitors are allowed to visit the site each day; only 500 can walk the 4-day Inca trail treck, of which 300 are porters and guides. The majority of these statistics are given by Amy Cox Hall in the Introduction (p. 2) of her book. But however impressive those numbers are, this is not a book