Every year, local communities on either side of the Apurimac River Canyon use traditional Inka engineering techniques to rebuild the Q’eswachaka Bridge. The entire bridge is built in only three days. The bridge has been rebuilt in this same location continually since the time of the Inka.
[The Bridge at Q’eswachaka] (Viewer #853,185)
Inca is now Inka?
Never heard anything about this feel-good story of aboriginal brilliance before, which makes me a tiny bit skeptical.
I don’t pretend to know everything about this stuff, but it seems like a tale that should have seeped into popular culture knowledge before now, if only as an analogy to sandcastle-building or Burning Man or some of the weird festivals in Europe.
Another red flag for stories like this is when they use unfamiliar place-names without saying what country they’re in, as if to imply, “What? You’ve never heard of the Apurimac River or the Q’eswachaka Bridge? What kind of education *did* you have?”
@1 – I know what you mean about the underlying air of smug that comes from both spelling of Inca and the omission of the word Peru. Anyway, looks like this is the last such bridge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_rope_bridge
Thanks for not yelling at me for not Googling it, Harvey!
I looked it up on Google, but such is the state of the world now, I don’t believe at face value anything posted by Wikipedia, the Smithsonian, National Geographic, UNESCO, or any of the private tourist blogs that describe this bridge — unless I see when the entry was created or updated. And that was too much depth to go into on this one.
Too many stories spread like wildfire by sites merely stating as common knowledge info they only read on other sites.
Anyway, some of these sites describe this as a long-existing bridge, that undergoes repeated maintenance each year, which happens to involve releasing the old bridge’s ropes, which answers my question as to why this didn’t become an iconic story of building a new bridge from scratch each year.
Personally, I tend to trust Wikipedia as general overview of non-current-event topics, mostly on the theory that the pedantic nit-pickery of fact-nerds on both sides will tend, in the long run, to cancel out bias. The siren song of proving someone wrong on the internet is too strong for any Wikipedian to resist.
I’ve been wrong on the internet before… it’s like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gciFoEbOA8
That was like listening to NPR with a video. A feel good piece about a community coming together to achieve a common goal.
What they need is to have some engineers come and build a bridge that will last for more than one season.
@5 – According to Wikipedia, they already have a real bridge, and only keep this one in working order out of a sense of tradition. It’s less like the DoT and more like a quilting bee.
… or an analogy for Windows versions?