The navel of the Inca world on the eve of the conquest: the great square with its ushnu, the palaces of the dead kings round it, walled kancha compounds packed between two canalised rivers, the Temple of the Sun at their meeting, the four royal roads leaving for the four quarters of the empire, and the fortress on the hill above.
Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Cuzco in 1539, described his city as it had been under the Incas. It was divided from its foundation into two halves, Hanan (upper) and Hurin (lower) Cuzco; its great square, Haucaypata, was the point from which four roads ran out to the four quarters of the empire, which was itself called Tahuantinsuyu, “the four parts together”. Round the square stood the palaces of the kings, each a walled compound behind a great hall that opened onto it; in one corner stood a round tower; in the middle, the ushnu from which the Inca presided.
The body of the city was made of kanchas: rectangular walled enclosures with a single doorway on the street, their thatched stone houses turned inward to a court. Blocks of two kanchas back to back made the narrow straight streets, paved and with a channel of water down the middle, between the Saphi and Tullumayo rivers, which the Incas had walled into stone channels. At the rivers’ meeting in lower Cuzco stood the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, its walls of the finest masonry banded with gold. The lords of the conquered provinces were obliged to keep houses in wards round the core, each on the side of the city that faced his own land, so that, as Garcilaso put it, the city held a picture of the whole empire.
The model follows Garcilaso’s account and the Inca walls that still stand in the colonial city; the plan is turned so that the valley runs, as it does, from north-west to south-east. Click any building to see its rule and the chapter that describes it.