Today the highland Peruvian site of Machu Picchu attracts around 1.5 million visitors each year. This fifteenth-century Inca complex figures prominently not only in discourses of Peruvian national identity, but also in global conversations about heritage and conservation, through its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yet, Machu Picchu's entrée in these arenas is relatively recent. In this engaging study, Mark Rice asks, “How… did Machu Picchu transform from a site so obscure that few, if any, remember its original name to such a powerful representation of Peru?” (2). Over five chapters, he charts the twentieth-century evolution of tourism to Machu Picchu and the nearby city of Cuzco as the result of complex negotiations among local, regional, national, and international interests. This study is a significant contribution to tourism studies of the Americas, which thus far have not focused extensively on the Andean region.

Working with a rich archive of primary sources, including some collections not heretofore studied, as well as with influential figures in Cuzco-based tourism, Rice elaborates three general periods that shaped Machu Picchu as a tourist destination. During the first, 1900 to 1948, tourism initiatives sought to celebrate cusqueño modernity and indigenista folklore. From 1948 to 1975, local leaders emphasized tourism as a generator of modernization through Pan-Americanist alliances and state-led development initiatives. In the final period, 1975 to 2011, some countercultural tourists who gravitated to Cuzco in the 1960s went on to become entrepreneurs in their own right, launching new forms of adventure tourism. In contrast to previous generations, their efforts stressed Machu Picchu's ancient and exotic qualities as a lure for both tourists and investors from the “global North” (159).

Rice summarily dismisses as a “false touristic narrative” (5) the importance often ascribed to US explorer Hiram Bingham III as “discoverer of the lost city” of Machu Picchu. Bingham's expeditions to Peru between 1909 to 1915 are only briefly recounted here. The adventurer who left Peru in disgrace plays a more central role in this study upon his triumphal return to the country in 1948 as a boost to the nascent cusqueño tourism industry, his reputation recast as the “benevolent Pan-American discoverer of Machu Picchu” (67). More integral to this story are a series of fascinating and visionary figures whose careers in diverse fields helped to shape Machu Picchu as a tourist destination. Some, like the cusqueño indigenista Luis E. Valcárcel, are well-known but not often associated with tourism. Others, admirably animated by Rice through archival sources, include Albert Giesecke, the Philadelphia-born educator who served as a Cuzco city official and rector of the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco in the first half of the twentieth century; Benjamín Roca Muelle, who spearheaded Peruvian state-supported tourism initiatives at mid-century, predicting that tourism would “become a river of gold for Peru” (63); and regional inspector of archaeology Manuel Chávez Ballòn, who became immersed in debates about the preservation versus restoration of Machu Picchu as he oversaw regional development projects following the devastating earthquake that shook Cuzco in 1948.

Counterintuitive alliances and competing meanings surrounding Machu Picchu in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries expose tensions among regional, national, and international actors. As Rice notes, “[i]f tourism can promote Cusco and Machu Picchu as iconic national symbols, it can also transform them into representations of modern Peru's blemishes as well” (157). For example, Rice demonstrates that development projects in the form of hotels and transportation infrastructure exacerbated long-standing tensions between Lima and Cuzco. Despite changes over the century, however, one reality remains constant: the wealth generated by tourism to Machu Picchu is not equitably distributed among the region's inhabitants, and the social and political demands of indigenous communities are largely divorced from the tourism industry. Nonetheless, this industry capitalizes on an indigenous presence. From the discipline of anthropology, Marisol de la Cadena corroborates this observation in her work on shamanic tourism in the region, finding that indigenous communities and tourists in Cuzco Department inhabit intersecting, yet incommensurate, worlds.

Though Rice gestures toward the importance of visual culture, mass media, and literature in shaping Machu Picchu as a “transnational contact zone” (160), this study does not substantially explore cultural production and the texture of everyday life in and around Machu Picchu. It does admirably suggest many topics for future research along these lines. For example, Rice offers a brief but fascinating discussion of the “brichero,” a tour guide to international visitors who makes his appearance in Cuzco and Machu Picchu during the 1960s and 1970s. Complementing scholarship in adjacent fields, the strength of this work is its original historical research, which clearly elucidates how Machu Picchu and its environs have become endangered by excessive tourism and the absence of enduring policies that would foster “inclusive development” (166).