Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, was the greatest ceremony of the Inca year, held at Cusco around the June solstice, which in the southern hemisphere is midwinter and the point at which the sun is furthest away and must be called back. The account most often followed is that of Garcilaso de la Vega, born at Cusco in 1539 to an Inca noblewoman and a Spanish captain, who wrote in Spain decades later, having seen the last observances as a child.
By his description the Sapa Inca and the nobility fasted beforehand, then gathered before dawn in the great square, barefoot, facing east, and waited in silence for the sun to rise, at which they crouched and raised their hands and made the kissing gesture of reverence. The Inca poured chicha to the sun from a gold vessel, some of it channelled toward the Coricancha. New fire was kindled by focusing the sun's rays with a concave mirror onto cotton, and if cloud prevented it the fire was made by friction, which was taken as a bad omen. Llamas were offered and their entrails read. Feasting and dancing went on for days.
The Spanish banned it. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who also had the last Inca ruler Tupac Amaru executed in the square at Cusco in 1572, prohibited the ceremony as idolatry, and the public festival ended, though observances continued privately and in altered forms alongside the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi, which falls at nearly the same time and absorbed some of the same processional practice.
In 1944 a group of Cusco intellectuals and artists staged a reconstruction of Inti Raymi at the fortress of Sacsayhuaman above the city, working from Garcilaso's text. It has been performed every 24 June since and now draws large audiences. What it is remains genuinely contested: a civic pageant, a piece of heritage theatre, an assertion of indigenous identity against five centuries of suppression, and for some participants an act of worship. It is not a survival and does not claim to be.