The Supreme Court of Peru ruled last Monday that the Machu Picchu archaeological park in Peru, which is also the country’s main tourist attraction, is owned by the State after rejecting the claim of a family that said that this historic place belonged to them.
“The Chamber of Constitutional and Social Law of the Supreme Court of Justice declared unfounded the lawsuit filed by the Zavaleta Zavaleta family to claim land from the Machu Picchu National Archaeological Park, located in the province of Urubamba (Cusco),” the ministry of Culture said in a statement.
This lawsuit, according to information from Infobae, was filed in 2005. The Zavaleta Zavaleta family claimed they owned more than 22,000 hectares of land, which included the Inca Trail and the Machu Picchu citadel.
After four years of legal battle, the Decentralized Directorate of Culture of Cusco demonstrated that the land that was being claimed belonged to the Peruvian State. “We have demonstrated in a convincing manner that these lands were expropriated by the General Directorate of Agrarian Reform in the 1960s and 1970s in favor of the State,” the vice minister of Cultural Heritage and Cultural Industries, Guillermo Cortés Carcelén, said.
