Roaming South America

Cusco, Perú: Empire, Conquest, and Rediscovery

April 11, 2026

I'm in Cusco for 1 - 2 weeks. I'm not here to visit, take a few pics of Machu Picchu, and leave. I'm here to get a first-hand look at the city and the neighborhoods where one of my books takes place. And let me tell you - Cusco is an amazing place to visit. Not just the archeological sites outside and throughout the city, but the city itself. That's something most tourists miss - the whole of Cusco, the city. So, I'm visiting the neighborhoods, the markets, and walking the streets from the northern Santa Ana barrio to the south-central district of Wanchaq. I'll also be visiting some archeological sites in the Sacred Valley, but those are just for fun.

I'll be writing a few blogs during my stay here, as there's a lot to write about. This first blog is the history of Cusco, summarized in one blog. Be sure to check back in a few days for more about Cusco (but no more history).

Cusco: Where the World Was Made - The Inkas

Long before the Spanish ever set eyes on it, Cusco was already ancient. The Inca called it Qosqo, the navel of the world, and from this high Andean valley they built the largest empire the Americas had ever seen. The Tawantinsuyu, or "Land of the Four Parts," stretched from present-day Ecuador in the north to central Chile in the south, governing an estimated ten million people through an extraordinary system of roads, storehouses, and administrators. At the center of it all sat Cusco, a city of perhaps 240,000 people by the 16th century, its streets laid out in the shape of a puma, its temples sheathed in gold.

The Inca did not build in isolation. They inherited a site with a much older history and transformed it into an imperial capital of breathtaking ambition. Their architecture was equally breathtaking - massive stone blocks fitted together with such precision that no mortar was needed, and walls designed to flex during earthquakes rather than collapse. The great temple of Qorikancha, dedicated to the sun god Inti, was so completely covered in gold plate that Spanish eyewitnesses struggled to describe what they saw. Four royal roads radiated outward from the Plaza de Armas - then called Huacaypata - connecting the capital to the farthest corners of the empire via the Qhapaq Ñan, the Andean road system now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The empire's end came with shocking speed. By the time the Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived, the Inca were already weakened - a devastating civil war between half-brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa had split the empire, and European diseases had swept through the population ahead of the conquistadors themselves. Pizarro captured Atahualpa at the northern-central Peruvian city of Cajamarca in November 1532, held him for an enormous ransom of gold and silver, and then executed him anyway in July 1533. With the empire leaderless and in disarray, the road to Cusco lay open.

The Conquest: Layers Upon Layers

On November 15, 1533, Pizarro entered Cusco through the hill of Carmenca - today's barrio of Santa Ana, which I visited and have many photos of in my photo album - descending into the city along the gradual cobbled road, now called Conquista, but historically - El Callejón de la Conquista, (pics in my photo album) that the Inca had built to carry llama trains and foot traffic from the northern territories. The Spanish later named it El Callejón de la Conquista, the Alley of the Conquest, and it can still be walked today, its original stones intact, its drainage channels still there along the edges. The city received Pizarro with acclamation, welcoming him as a liberator from Atahualpa's rule. The celebration was short-lived. Within days, the conquistadors had stripped the Qorikancha of its gold and begun the systematic plunder of everything the Inca had built. They just about destroyed the temple; only the lower walls remained, on which the Spanish built their own church - Iglesia y Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzmán.

The Spanish did not so much replace Cusco as layer themselves over it. Churches rose on top of temples, colonial walls were raised on Inca foundations, and the streets the Inca had engineered became the streets of a new colonial city. The massive stone foundations you see throughout the centro histórico today - those precisely fitted blocks running along the base of churches, convents, and ordinary houses - are not decorative. They are the original Inca city, still doing its structural work five centuries later. When the 1650 earthquake transformed much of colonial Cusco into rubble, the Inca walls stood firm. I have many pics of those in the photo album.

The colonial centuries were not kind to Cusco. Lima, founded by Pizarro in 1535 on the Pacific coast, became the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the silver wealth of Potosí, Bolivia, bypassed Cusco entirely. The loads of silver were hauled by llama trains south through northwest Argentina, then west to Arica, Chile, where it was shipped to Lima, then to Spain.

Potosí's silver was so abundant it quite literally changed the global economy - so much silver flooded into Europe through Spain that it triggered significant inflation across the continent in the 16th and 17th centuries. The wealth extracted from that one Bolivian mountain reshaped the world, while Cusco, the city that had been the center of everything, quietly faded.

It wasn't long before Cusco faded into provincial obscurity, shaken periodically by earthquakes and political upheaval. In 1780, a mestizo rebel who took the name Túpac Amaru II led the most serious indigenous uprising since Manco Inca's siege of 1536, coming close to driving the Spanish out before being captured and publicly executed in the Plaza de Armas. The aftermath of the rebellion saw a Spanish crackdown that was severe and deliberate. They systematically suppressed Inca cultural symbols, banned the Quechua language in official contexts, prohibited indigenous people from wearing traditional clothing, and even banned the image of the Inca, essentially trying to erase the cultural identity that had fueled the uprising. It was a significant cultural wound on the region.

Rebellion, Repression, and Independence

The independence of Peru in 1821 was largely a coastal and Lima-driven affair, led by José de San Martín arriving from the south and Simón Bolívar coming from the north. Cusco's formal independence came in 1824, notably after the Battle of Ayacucho in November of that year, which was the decisive final battle of Spanish colonial rule in South America - fought not far from Cusco in the highlands.

By the time of the Battle of Ayacucho, San Martín had already withdrawn from the scene. He and Bolívar had met at the famous Guayaquil Conference in July 1822, after which San Martín stepped aside and left the completion of South American independence to Bolívar. The Battle of Ayacucho on December 9, 1824, was fought between: The patriot forces - commanded by Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar's most trusted general. Bolívar himself was not present at the battle, though it was fought under his overall campaign. And the royalist Spanish forces - commanded by Viceroy José de la Serna. It was a decisive and surprisingly swift victory for Sucre. The battle lasted only about an hour, and the surrender that followed effectively ended Spanish colonial rule in South America. De la Serna was captured during the fighting, and the subsequent surrender agreement - the Capitulation of Ayacucho - was remarkably generous, allowing Spanish troops to return home rather than face imprisonment. Antonio José de Sucre went on to become the first president of Bolivia, which was named after Simón Bolívar, and the Bolivian capital, Sucre, is named after Antonio José de Sucre.

Rediscovery: Cusco Returns to the World

The 20th century gave Cusco back to the world. Hiram Bingham's announcement of Machu Picchu in 1911 drew international attention to the region, and the city began its long emergence from obscurity. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage site, and the Peruvian government invested heavily in conservation and restoration. Today, Cusco is one of South America's great cities - not a museum, but a living place where Quechua is still spoken in the markets, where colonial doors open onto Inca courtyards, where a passageway used by conquistadors is just the route people take to get from one neighborhood to another. The navel of the world is still here, still breathing, still carrying the weight of everything that happened on its stones.