Cusco was the sacred capital of the Inca empire, laid out as the centre of the known world, and at its heart stood the Qorikancha, the golden temple of the sun, over whose walls a Catholic convent now stands.
The navel of the four quarters
The Inca called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the four quarters, and Cusco its centre; the city's name is often glossed as "navel". Its plan is said to have taken the form of a puma, and from the Qorikancha radiated a system of some forty sight-lines called ceques, along which were arranged hundreds of shrines, or huacas, tended by particular kin groups, so that the sacred and social order of the empire was mapped onto the landscape around the capital. The scholarship of Brian Bauer reconstructed this ceque system on the ground.
The Qorikancha
The Qorikancha, the "golden enclosure", was the supreme sanctuary of the sun god Inti and held shrines to the moon, the stars, thunder and the rainbow. Early Spanish accounts describe its walls sheathed in gold and a garden of golden plants, stripped to help pay the ransom of the captured emperor Atahualpa. The mummified bodies of past emperors were kept and honoured here. Its superb mortarless stonework, curved and precise, survives as the foundation of the colonial church and convent of Santo Domingo built directly on top of it, an image of conquest that also, through repeated earthquakes, has demonstrated the superiority of Inca masonry as the church cracked and the Inca walls held.
A living Andean city
Cusco remains a living city with a large Quechua-speaking population whose Andean religious practices persist alongside Catholicism; festivals such as the reconstructed Inti Raymi sun ceremony are enacted each June. It is a World Heritage site, and the Qorikancha, church and temple in one structure, is among the clearest places in the Americas to read the layering of Indigenous and Christian sacred order.