Cusco - Capital of the Incan Empire

Our last day touring Peru was spent in Cusco near the Urubamba Valley of the Andes mountain range at about 11,000 feet. Cusco was the historic capital of the Inca Empire from the 13th into the 16th century until the Spanish conquest.

We visited a Dominican church built on the foundations of the Koricancha, the Inca's principal religious building. In this picture you can see the Incan stone wall with its characteristic style with traditional western style columns on the other side.

The Spanish used the existing Incan walls as the first floor walls then built another story of walls on top of them. An earthquake caused the Spanish built walls to collapse but the Incan walls were so well built they remained.

This picture shows an Incan alley and through the alley you can see a Roman style arch (which the Inca never discovered).

On our way to visit the next site we stopped on a hillside to view the city of Cusco but the most photogenic thing there was this llama that walked by. They are so cute.

Last we visited Sacsayhuaman is the religious site above Cusco. It was built with limestone instead of granite so the stones were easier to carve and so they used much larger stones than for other sites. One of the stones is estimated to weight 70 tons. They built the walls with a zigzag pattern for stability.

This is the last of the Incan stone sites we will visit. Anyone who loves well built stone walls should definitely come to Peru.

Tomorrow we leave Cusco for Lima. We don't have anything planned so we'll probably do a little shopping and rest. Then on Friday we fly to Guayaquil, Ecuador on our way to the Galapagos Islands. Unless something noteworthy happens during this transit I will pick up the blog on Friday when we arrive in Guayaquil.