In 1911, American explorer Hiram Bingham went looking for Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Incas after the Spanish conquest, and instead climbed into Machu Picchu, a terraced city hidden on a ridge above the Urubamba River. This film works from Bingham's own journals and photographs to rebuild the expedition step by step, including the porters and local farmers who led him there and the excavation that followed. It also takes seriously a question Bingham's own fame obscured: whether Machu Picchu was actually the lost city he set out to find, or something else entirely, a royal estate rather than a last stand. Historians and archaeologists walk the site's terraces and temples on camera, weighing what the stonework and burials actually tell us against Bingham's own conclusions. The result treats the discovery less as a triumph than as a puzzle Bingham himself may have misread, using his archive against him to get closer to what Machu Picchu really was.