Phuyupatamarka Inca Ruins
The Inca ruins of Phuyupatamarka is located at 3,600masl the name means town over the cloud; this name was given by the American explorer Mr. Hiram Bingam. This name fits, because at night clouds tend to settle around this ridge. At Phuyupatamarka, there are many agricultural terraces here, possibly enough to have made the site self-sufficient. Once again we find ritual baths here-a fine principal bath at the outskirts of the ruins beside the road leading into the complex, and a chain of five almost identical baths descending in a line along the pathway below. These have recently been cleared and restored to working order.
At the top of the site stands a large platform of bedrock which has been leveled off by hand-an amazing feat when we consider the tools the Incas had to work with. The base of a fine double jamb entranceway can be seen here, and this was evidently the beginning of a structure that was destined to be the most important in the complex. But we can see that it was never completed, because there is no sign of the heaps of cut stones that we would inevitably find had there been finished walls which later collapsed.
Above the ruins stands a ledge littered with rocks that may have served as a quarry. There you can see a block of stone about three meters long, with three deep grooves cut into it, suggesting that someone was in the process of carving this stone into four separate blocks. The cliff edge was once crowned with a long wall at this point-the bedding-cuts in the rock can be seen clearly.
Each of the small groups of buildings in the ruins features a semi circular or semi-ovoid structure, resembling a low, single-store tower. Some of them have sinuous, irregular shapes that seem molded to follow the outlines of the rock on which they are built, and all of them look outwards over the immense Urubamba gorge. These miniature towers are a unique feature of Phuyupatamarka.