The plant is found in the wild near Machu Picchu and nearby areas in Peru, where it is known as gallo-gallo, meaning "rooster" after the rooster-like red comb, crest and wattles of the flower.

[3] Long considered the national treasure of Peru,[4] it is rumoured to have been cultivated by the Incas centuries ago, who called the plant waqanki.

[5] This cool to cold growing, large, terrestrial, sometimes lithophytic or rarely epiphytic, tufted species with erect leaves is found at a height of between 2,000 and 4,000 metres, including around Machu Picchu in Peru,[2] on steep rocky slopes covered with grasses and shrubs in full sun but with the leaves protected by the grass with short ramicauls enveloped by a series of tubular bracts with a linear-oblanceolate, tapered to the channelled petiolate base, acute, thick leaf that blooms in the spring and early summer with an erect, 39 to 44 cm.

The unequal colour distribution apparent in M. veitchiana is accorded to the presence of minute purple hairs on the sepals which lend a prismatic visual aspect to the flower.

A few years later it was re-discovered in the same locality by Walter Davis, who states that it grows in the crevices and hollows of the rocks with but little soil, at an altitude of 11,000-13,000 ft.