A new road had recently been built along the river bank by the owner of the sugar estate at Paltaybamba, to enable his pack animals to travel more rapidly.  Much of it had to be carved out of the face of a solid rock precipice and in places it pierces the cliffs in a series of little tunnels.  My gendarme missed this road and took the steep old trail over the cliffs.  As Ocampo said in his story of Captain Garcia’s expedition, “the road was narrow in the ascent with forest on the fight, and on the left a ravine of great depth.”  We reached Paltaybamba about dusk.  The owner, Senor Jose S. Pancorbo, was absent, attending to the affairs of a rubber estate in the jungles of the river San Miguel.  The plantation of Paltaybamba occupies the best lands in the lower Vilcabamba Valley, but lying, as it does, well off the main highway, visitors are rare and our arrival was the occasion for considerable excitement.  We were not unexpected, however.  It was Senor Pancorbo who had assured us in Cuzco that we should find ruins near Pucyura and he had told his major-domo to be on the look-out for us.  We had a long talk with the manager of the plantation and his friends that evening.  They had heard little of any ruins in this vicinity, but repeated one of the stories we had heard in Santa Ana, that way off somewhere in the montana there was “an Inca city.”  All agreed that it was a very difficult place to reach; and none of them had ever been there.  In the morning the manager gave us a guide to the next house up the valley, with orders that the man at that house should relay us to the next, and so on.  These people, all tenants of the plantation, obligingly carried out their orders, although at considerable inconvenience to themselves.

The Vilcabamba Valley above Paltaybamba is very picturesque.  There are high mountains on either side, covered with dense jungle and dark green foliage, in pleasing contrast to the light green of the fields of waving sugar cane.  The valley is steep, the road is very winding, and the torrent of the Vilcabamba roars loudly, even in July.  What it must be like in February, the rainy season, we could only surmise.  About two leagues above Paltaybamba, at or near the spot called by Raimondi “Maracnyoc,” an “abandoned tampu,” we came to some old stone walls, the ruins of a place now called Huayara or “Hoyara.”  I believe them to be the ruins of the first Spanish settlement in this region, a place referred to by Ocampo, who says that the fugitives of Tupac Amaru’s army were “brought back to the valley of Hoyara,” where they were “settled in a large village, and a city of Spaniards was founded ....  This city was founded on an extensive plain near a river, with an admirable climate.  From the river channels of water were taken for the service of the city, the water being very good.”  The water here is excellent, far better than any in the Cuzco Basin.  On the plain near the river are some of the last cane fields of the plantation of Paltaybamba.  “Hoyara” was abandoned after the discovery of gold mines several leagues farther up the valley, and the Spanish “city” was moved to the village now called Vilcabamba.