Lima (AFP)

Closed since March due to the new coronavirus pandemic, the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, the main tourist site in Peru, is celebrating the 109th anniversary of its discovery by American explorer Hiram Bingham without tourists on Friday.

The site has been empty since the establishment of the state of health emergency on March 16 in the Andean country. Authorities hoped to reopen Machu Picchu on Friday but had to give up in the face of the continued rise in the number of Covid-19 cases.

"Last year a lot of people came for the anniversary, but this time, unfortunately, we are not going to have any visitors," Darwin Baca, mayor of the district where the citadel is located, told AFP.

"The date of reopening is not yet defined. It will probably be in August because cases are on the rise in the (region of) Cuzco", where Machu Picchu is located, added Mr. Baca.

The regional governor of Cuzco, Jean Paul Benavente, had announced ten days ago that the Inca citadel would reopen on July 24, if sanitary conditions were met, but he himself contracted the coronavirus shortly after and the project was abandoned.

Covid-19 rapid test centers must still be installed at the station and local authorities must obtain an ambulance, the mayor detailed. The town hall has already set up a decontamination airlock for train passengers.

According to the new standards related to the coronavirus, only 675 visitors will be able to access the site per day, against 2,000 to 3,000 before the pandemic and up to 5,000 in high season.

Peru's borders, which has 371,096 cases, including 17,654 deaths, have been closed for more than four months, causing tourism to collapse in that country.

The city of Machu Picchu, whose name means "Old Mountain" in the Quechua language, was built during the reign of Emperor Pachacutec (1438-1471). Discovered by the American explorer Hiram Bingham in 1911 and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983, the city is located about a hundred kilometers from Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire in the south-east of present-day Peru.

Emblematic site of the Inca Empire which dominated western Latin America for a hundred years before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, it is perched on a rocky outcrop at an altitude of 2,400 meters.

© 2020 AFP