Blog | Alex Strickland

According to Inca legend, Cuzco is the navel of the world, so named because it is the planet’s “center”. After airline delays and an unscheduled stop in the small mountain town of Arequipa, we arrived in Cuzco around lunchtime and set to work seeing the sites. After the smog and congestion of Lima it was a relief to see some blue skies. First up was the Incan Temple of the Sun/Dominican Church.  A massive earthquake in 1950  cracked hundreds of years of plaster, revealing to archeologists that the long-sought Incan temple was, in fact, the foundation and walls of one of the city’s largest Catholic structures. It seems the Incan’s knack for engineering was too good to tear down, to the Dominicans simply built over the site in an attempt to disguise it. Regardless, it was beautiful, as is the rest of the city.

Inca walls inside the Temple of the Sun.

Stone blocks made by the Incas to construct enormous walls without the use of mortar. The hole in the foreground would have a "male" block fitted to it, while the shaped cutouts would be filled with molten copper and used as "staples" to hold the blocks together.

Terraces outside the Temple of the Sun served as a place to common people to place offerings to the sun god, as only priests and the Inca king were allowed in the temple.

The city of Cuzco

A church and hillside above the Plaza De Armas in downtown Cuzco.

The cathedral in the Plaza De Armas at sunset.