Banned, Then Restaged, a Festival's Two Separate Lives

Inti Raymi falls on the twenty fourth of June, the date of the June solstice, the winter solstice in the southern Andes rather than the summer solstice the same June date marks in the northern hemisphere. The festival as described by the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, whose own mother was an Inca noblewoman and whose Comentarios Reales de los Incas is the fullest surviving account of Inca court religious practice, was a major state ceremony in Cusco honoring Inti, the sun god at the center of official Inca religion, held at the solstice specifically because it marked the sun's furthest point of retreat in the Andean sky before its return.

The festival was suppressed by Spanish colonial authorities as a pagan rite, a process that intensified after the execution of the last Inca ruler, Tupac Amaru, in 1572. The observance kept today is a twentieth century revival rather than an unbroken survival, staged for the first time in 1944 by a group of Cusco intellectuals as a historical reenactment performed at the Sacsayhuaman fortress above the city, and it continues today as a major annual public event blending cultural heritage performance with contemporary Andean Indigenous identity.