Peru - Lonely Planet Publications [173]
When Manco discovered the place, he quickly subdued the natives and founded the city that was to become the center of one of the Americas’ greatest empires. And people have been here ever since: Cuzco is the oldest continuously inhabited city in South America, and the continent’s undisputed archaeological capital.
Despite its wealth of ruins, museums and churches, Cuzco is aptly described by the belly-button analogy: a bit dirty and daunting sometimes, but engagingly, un-self-consciously bursting with life. It’s a place that inspires strong feelings. There’s a lot of mystical talk in Cuzco, about energy lines and cosmic confluences, and even the most hardened skeptics notice a certain something about the place.
Most South American cities have a merry, hectic street energy; in Cuzco it’s overwhelming. Walk through the Plaza de Armas and you’ll see people hawking massages, finger puppets, paintings, CDs and tattoos – it’s not for the fainthearted. This is one of the most relentlessly tourism-dominated towns on the face of the earth, and unless you make the effort to get a few blocks (that’s all it takes) away from the madness of the Plaza, you may find yourself feeling like a walking ATM.
That’s about the only downside. Despite a tidal wave of tourism and massive immigration from the provinces over the last couple of decades, and the years of terrorism before that, Cuzco is a relatively safe place with decent infrastructure and a lovable population of dauntless entrepreneurs ranging from singing shoeshine boys to flamboyant nightclub magnates.
Hushed museums and churches. Animal organs on skewers and high-art haute cuisine. Sex, drugs and rock and roll spill out from colonial palaces decked out as nightclubs into cobbled streets built for llama traffic. History forces itself on your attention at every corner. Cuzco is a diverse, gritty, greedy, irresistibly vital madhouse. However long you plan to spend here, it won’t be enough.
Return to beginning of chapter
HISTORY
The Inca empire’s main expansion occurred in the hundred years prior to the arrival of the conquistadors in 1532. When the Spanish reached Cuzco, they began keeping chronicles, including Inca history as related by the Incas themselves. The most famous of these accounts was The Royal Commentaries of the Incas, written by Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish military captain.
The ninth inca (king), Pachacutec, gave the empire its first bloody taste of conquest. Until his time, the Incas had dominated only a modest area close to Cuzco, though they frequently skirmished with other highland tribes. One such tribe was the Chanka, whose growing thirst for expansion led them to Cuzco’s doorstep in 1438.
Pachacutec’s father, Viracocha Inca, fled in the belief that his small empire was lost. But Pachacutec refused to give up the fight. With the help of some of the older generals, he rallied the Inca army and in a desperate final battle – in which, legend claims, the very boulders transformed themselves into warriors to fight alongside the Incas – he famously managed to vanquish the Chanka. The victorious younger Pachacutec proclaimed himself inca and, buoyed by his victory, embarked upon the first wave of expansion that would create the Inca empire. During the next 25 years, he bagged much of the central Andes, including the region between the two great lakes of Titicaca and Junín.
Pachacutec also proved himself a sophisticated urban developer, devising Cuzco’s famous puma shape and diverting rivers to cross the city. He also built fine buildings, including the famous Qorikancha temple and a palace on a corner of what is now the Plaza de Armas.
Pachacutec’s successor, Túpac Yupanqui, was every bit his father’s son. During the 1460s he helped his father subdue a great area to the north, including what is today the northern Peruvian and southern Ecuadorian Andes, as well as the northern Peruvian coast.