Tourists Who Defecated in Machu Picchu Face Prison Time
(Photo : pixabay.com)

If you think damaging a heritage site such as Machu Picchu has no grave consequences, think again.

More than a week after Peru launched an effort to rehabilitate and protect Machu Picchu, tourists have been arrested after they were found exploiting the area.

According to Mitu, a group of six tourists made up of one French, two Brazilians, two Argentines and a Chilean, in their twenties and early thirties were arrested on Sunday after Peruvian park rangers and police officers caught them dumping their feces in a restricted area of Machu Picchu's Temple of the Sun, a revered part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Authorities have also discovered damages in the Temple of the Sun after a piece of stone had "broken off a wall and caused a crack in the floor." Regional police chief Wilbert Leyva said in an interview with a local news agency, "The six tourists are being detained and investigated by the public ministry for the alleged crime against cultural heritage."

If found guilty of damaging Peru's heritage, the offenders will face at least four years in prison. Several parts of the semicircular Temple of the Sun are off limits to tourists for preservation reasons, including the part where the tourists defecated.

Worshipers at the temple would make offerings to the sun which is considered the most important deity in the Inca empire as well as other pre-Inca civilizations in the Andean region. The Machu Picchu, built in 15th century, includes three distinct areas for agriculture, housing and religious ceremonies. Ruling a large swathe of western South America for 100 years before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, it is considered the most iconic site from the Inca empire.

In 2014, authorities denounced a trend that saw tourists getting naked at the sacred location. This led to the detention of four American tourists March of that year for removing their clothes and posing for photos at the heritage site. In a pair of separate incidents earlier in the same week, two Canadians and two Australians were detained for stripping down for pictures there. In 2013, a naked couple was videotaped by other tourists while racing across Machu Picchu's grass field and bounding down a stone staircase like a pair of adolescent antelopes.

In Quechua, a language indigenous to the area, Machu Picchu means "old mountain."

Penalizing tourists exploiting the site is only one of Peru's major efforts to preserve Machu Picchu. Last week, Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra announced launched a campaign to plant 1,000,000 trees in the protected zone around the Machu Picchu sanctuary, according to an article by Latin Post.

Machu Picchu is located at the top of a lush mountain and was built during the reign of the Inca emperor Pachacuti (1438-1471). The historic site lies around 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Andean city of Cusco, the old Inca capital in southeastern Peru. American explorer Hiram Bingham rediscovered the site in 191. Meanwhile, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1983.