Looking at those ruins one can forget how relatively young that place is. And looking at mostly modern buildings at the village I come from - easy to forget that the place is much older than Machu Picchu. It was probably luck and the fact that my place is (and was) irrelevant - so it could survive.
I remember on my way back from Machu Picchu, I was still thinking about how relatively young it was when we were touring Lima and were shown Huaca Pucllana, a clay/adobe pyramid in downtown Lima that's probably around 1,000 years older than Macchu Pichu. What's neat is had Lima not been in a desert, 1500 years of rainfall would've ruined the place.
