Michael Batson

Cusco, the ancient capital of the Inca, sits high in an Andean valley. The modern name is a Spanish corruption from the Aymara and Quechua languages, which drew on mythical origins to name the city.

The origin of civilisation in Peru can be traced back 20,000 years before the Incas, making the country one of the cradles of ancient cultures along with China, Egypt, India, and Mesopotamia.

From Peru’s second city Arequipa the journey is 15 hours by bus passing through the Shining Path hotbed city of Juliaca in the Puno region, over endless twisting mountain roads. Or you can fly in under an hour. I chose the latter.

The pilots I noticed were the last to board the Boeing 737, entering the plane still wearing their Ray Ban aviators, or versions of them, to applause from the waiting passengers, like rock stars. Boarding from the terminal I’d passed them on the tarmac sipping mate tea, made from cocoa leaves. Either pre-flight checks are done early, or, dispensed with entirely in favour of the grand entrance. It’s style over substance – or should that be safety.

Pilots need good visibility to land in so Flights to Cusco are usually in the morning when the weather is better. My taxi was an old Chevrolet of gas-guzzling proportions. The bench seats so wide I could almost sleep there and skip the hotel.

Home was a colonial-era building complete with wooden balcony and internal courtyard. Prices were relatively cheap, the cholera and dearth of tourists had seen to that. The room’s bathroom brought new meaning to a water closet.

The town’s water supply was erratic. The reason for this was unclear but everyday usually in the evening, off it would go. I shuddered to think how restaurants coped, but cope they did. I didn’t however, and it was here that I picked up my first ever bout of giardia.

Cusco is a tourist mecca. The region is rich in history and best known for the mountain Inca city of Machu Picchu “rediscovered” by Higham Bingham in 1911. Prior to the arrival of the Inca in about 1300, the area was home to the Killke culture for about 300 years.

The legacy of the Killke is the massive fortress and temple at Sacsayhuaman (pronounced by locals in faltering English to much laughter as “sexy woman”) during the twelfth century. Later the fortress was used by the Inca, who bolstered its defences further and then by the Spanish, who used it for a quarry.

Sacsayhuaman is an impressive example of Inca military architecture, and well worth a visit. It is made up of three large terraces which overlap in a zigzag fashion. The enormous granite ramparts stretch about 300 metres with stones as high as five metres, some weighing as much as 350 tonnes. So perfectly are the stones aligned that Spanish chroniclers recorded that even a slim blade could not penetrate the joints. No cement was used to fix the stones together.

Legend has it that about 20,000 Indians hauled the largest stone into position and thousands were crushed when it toppled over at one stage. As impressive as the fortress is, it wasn’t enough to repel the Conquistadores. During the final battle for Cusco the Spanish forced the Incas back to the towers and slaughtered them. Leader Manco Inca escaped, retreating to Ollantaytambo, one hundred kilometres to the north of Cusco.

The condors on Cusco’s coat-of-arms are a macabre reference to the battle’s body count, immortalising the birds that came to feed on the dead. Soon after their victory, the Spanish tore down the walls using Sacsayhuaman as a quarry, and taking white stones to build churches and other structures in Cusco.

The conquest of the Inca was carried out by Francisco Pizarro in a series of expeditions during the 1530s, and launched following the Treaty of Tordesillas. The Treaty, endorsed by the pope, was an act of staggering arrogance whereby the fate of an entire continent and its peoples were divided between two European powers, Spain and Portugal.

Pizarro founded Lima, and like many of the conquistadores was a native of Extremadura, long the most impoverished part of the Spain. Their willingness to participate in global ventures was doubtless inspired by thoughts of social mobility, which meant getting rich.

Spurred on by earlier tales about a gold-rich territory called Virú, which was on a river called Pirú (later corrupted to Perú), an El Dorado to the south of Panama. Pizarro achieved his task with less than 200 soldiers but aided by thousands of Inca renegades, European firepower, the horse, Old World diseases, and massacres.

By today’s standards Pizarro was guilty of crimes against humanity but he wasn’t just ambitious and greedy, he was also ruthless. Capable of cruel acts against an entire society for personal gain, he was brutal also at an individual level. He had his rival Almagro, conqueror of Bolivia, murdered in 1538.

Pizarro’s capture of Cusco sealed the fate of the Inca Empire and completed the conquest of Peru for Spain.

A worthy dramatisation of conquistadores’ avarice in Peru is Werner Herzog’s Aguirre – The Wrath of God. The story follows the travels of Spanish soldier Lore de Aguirre, who leads a group of conquistadores down the Amazon River in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

Cusco is filled with Spanish arches and squares, and wooden balconies jutting out over narrow cobbled streets. The picturesque town was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983. Women in layered skirts, wearing stovepipe hats over long black plaits, chat in Quechua on the Cathedral steps, both fragments of the past hovering in the present.

Glowing examples of Spanish conquest abound in the colonial architecture while the precise stonework of the ancient walls is a reminder that the Incas founded the city. Despite high tourist traffic, the indigenous people ensure its Andean atmosphere is retained.

The commanding Cathedral, renovated between 1997 and 2002, pays tribute to the Renaissance on the outside and Baroque on the inside. Construction of the Cathedral began in 1560 but took almost 100 years to complete. The church was built on top of the palace of the eighth Inca, Viracocha, using red granite slabs from the fortress Sacsayhuman. Two auxiliary chapels sit on either side. On the left is El Triumfo, the Triumph, Cusco’s first church, built on top of the main Inca armoury to symbolise Spain’s victory over the Incas.

The Cathedral’s Renaissance façade is in contrast with the lavish Baroque interior containing colonial gold and silver and over 400 Cusco School paintings. The Cusco School of painting is hailed as one of the most important painting movements in the Americas, and grew out of the Spanish conquerors’ desire to convert locals to Catholicism.

Spain’s legacy to Peru isn’t just religion and language. Peru has a clear-cut class structure with indigenous people at the bottom, and the descendants of the Spanish at the top. Peru only got its first president of indigenous descent in 2001.

Cusco is home to Club Cienciano Football Club, the first Peruvian club to win an international title. They beat the two Argentine giants River Plate in the 2003 Copa Sudamericana, and then Boca Juniors in the Recopa Sudamericana the following year. Such was the surprised success of the team from Cusco their matches had to be played in Arequipa, as the local Cusco stadium Estadio Garcilaso de la Vega wasn’t then large enough.

Ollantaytambo is best described as a living Inca town. People have lived in these cobblestone streets since the 13th century, and strive to maintain ancient traditions, including farming techniques. The town is divided into individual courtyards, or canchas. Each courtyard has one entrance. A series of carved stone terraces, built to protect the valley from invaders, Spanish or otherwise, lead up to the fortress Araqama Ayliu. Within the fortress is an unfinished Temple of the Sun albeit an unfinished one, an one of the finest examples of Inca stonework.

From Cusco you can undertake a day tour to a number of sites including Tambomachay, Puca Pucara, Salapunco, and Qenko. Twenty-five kilometres away is Tipon, the picturesque set of stone canals, terraces, and stairways said to be part of the royal hacienda built by Wiracocha, the eighth Inca ruler.

San Pedro de Andahuaylillas is nicknamed the Sistine Chapel of the Americas. The Baroque high altar is cared in cedar and covered in gold leaf, and strategically placed mirrors reflect lighted candles. The church dates from the 17th century and other highlights include a shimmering gold leaf ceiling and artwork of the Cusco School. Also worth seeing is Moray and Salinas de Maras.

At first glimpse Moray looks like a Greek amphitheatre but closer inspection reveals what researchers believe may have been an Inca crop laboratory. Salinas de Maras (the Salt Mines), 50 kilometres from Cusco are a collection of pre-Colombian workings where 3000 workings were laid out to drain water before letting the sun evaporate the water, leaving only the salt.

Cusco is a testament to the clash of civilisations, the legacy of which can still be seen today.