Cusco, Home of the Incas

Inca legend has it that around 1200 AD Manco Capac, the first Inca leader, left Lake Titicaca in search of the location for the temple to the sun god. This turned out to be Qosqo (now Cusco meaning belly button) which went on to become the centre of an empire that extended along the Andes north past modern day Quito in Ecuador and well beyond Santiago de Chile in the south. On a European scale this would stretch from Lisbon to Moscow, some 2500 miles.

Nowadays Cusco is a cosmopolitan city of half a million inhabitants but its old city centre is full of Inca remains. Spanish colonial buildings sit on top of Inca walls built with huge rocks that were chiseled to fit exactly together.  It is a lovely place to spend a few days and is a worthy destination in itself - not just a stopping off point for Machu Picchu.

While here we have visited the Inca Museum to see some of the treasures that have been unearthed and been to some outlying sites such as Sacsaywayman on the hill above the city.  There we had a demonstration of why the Incas respected nature as a sunny afternoon turned into a vicious hail storm complete with a lightning strike and a rainbow.

Just before the lighting strike at Sacsaywayman

The Inca dominance spread until around 1530 when Pizarro's small expeditionary force arrived from Spain. With the limited resources of just 180 men, 27 horses and a cannon, Pizarro and his brutal conquistadors overthrew one of the world's great empires which had an army of 100,000 men.  He was aided by a civil war among the Incas, a smallpox epidemic and probably the belief locally that they were gods.

The rest as they say is history. And of course history is written by the winners, so the carnage, large-scale theft and attempted destruction of a culture was justified in the name of the Church.    The 1500s was Spain's golden age and the similarities with what we saw on last month's trip to Andalucía are striking. The cloistered patio of our hotel is almost identical to our hotel in Ubeda, which was built to celebrate the reconquest of Spain from the Moors.  The Christians also built on top of the main Inca Temple of the Sun, much as they did at the mosque in Córdoba.  The Moors who were ultimately expelled from Spain by the Inquisition would be surprised I'm sure if they knew that their arches would reappear in the Christian conquerors' buildings in South America.

However despite everything the indigenous culture has survived where the Moors didn't and tell tale signs of Inca resistance can be found even in the religious paintings in the Cathedral where the odd stray serpent appears. Now a new invasion, this time of tourists, has even started to bring the wealth back.