The Cusco Cathedral: A Church Built on a Palace, in Stones from a Fortress

Construction of the Cusco Cathedral began in 1559 and continued, with interruptions, until 1654. Almost a century of work. The building you see on the northeast side of the Plaza de Armas is the third of three connected churches that share the same wall: the Iglesia del Triunfo on the right, completed in 1539 on the foundations of the very first Christian church in Cusco, the Cathedral proper in the centre, and the Iglesia de Jesús María on the left, finished in 1733. The complex is read as a single facade because in colonial planning it functioned as one.

To understand the Cathedral as a piece of political architecture, hold three facts together.

What is underneath

The site directly under the Cathedral was the palace of Inca Viracocha. Viracocha was the eighth ruler in the dynastic list of the Inca state, reigning approximately in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, before the expansionist campaigns of Pachacuti redrew the boundaries of the empire. His palace, called Kiswarkancha, occupied a substantial part of the north side of the Inca plaza, which the Spanish renamed the Plaza de Armas. The palace was a residential and ceremonial complex with multiple courtyards and a series of high-precision masonry walls of the kind familiar from other surviving Inca sites in the city.

The Spanish demolished the palace in 1535. The decision was structural and symbolic. Structural because the new church needed a clear footprint on the most visible position on the new central plaza. Symbolic because the palace of the imperial dynasty was the most prestigious site in the city and putting the cathedral on it announced that the Spanish god now occupied the most sacred address. The same logic produced Santo Domingo on top of Qorikancha and La Merced on the palace of Pachacuti, all within a few blocks of each other.

What it is made of

The building stone is red Andesite granite. Most of it came from Sacsayhuamán, the colossal fortress on the hill above the city. Sacsayhuamán was the principal military and ceremonial complex of the Inca capital, built over several decades in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with stones of extraordinary size, some weighing more than a hundred tonnes. After the 1536 siege, when the Spanish nearly lost the city, they took possession of the fortress and began dismantling its upper structures for building material.

The granite blocks of the Cathedral walls are, in many cases, recut Inca stones. You can see this most clearly on the lower courses, where the block size is larger than typical Spanish quarry work and the cuts show the kind of close-fit dressing characteristic of Inca masonry. The Spanish quarrymen reshaped the faces and laid the blocks in mortared courses, which was not the Inca method, but the underlying stones were Inca.

This is not preservation. It is the opposite. The Inca fortress that had nearly defeated the conquest was systematically reduced over the following two centuries to provide cut stone for the colonial city. The Cathedral is, in this sense, the visible inventory of that dismantling. The same blocks that once held the high walls of Sacsayhuamán now hold up the nave of the Christian cathedral on the plaza below.

What is inside

Two pieces in the interior collection are central to the Cathedral's status in Andean Catholic practice and to the cultural history of colonial Peru.

The first is the painting of the Last Supper by Marcos Zapata, painted in the eighteenth century, hanging in the north aisle. Zapata was a leading painter of the Cuzco School, the colonial artistic movement that produced thousands of religious paintings from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth century, almost all by indigenous and mestizo artists working under Spanish iconographic supervision. The Last Supper canvas follows the standard European composition: Christ at the centre of a long table, the apostles flanking him, Judas isolated in the foreground.

What is on the table is the painting's argument. At the centre, instead of the lamb of the European tradition, sits a roasted cuy, a guinea pig, prepared in the Andean manner, splayed flat. Around it are local fruits and a jug of chicha, the maize beer that was the ceremonial drink of the Inca state. The painting reads as devotional. It also reads as a quiet substitution. The body of Christ is being commemorated with the foods of the people who are receiving the commemoration.

The Cuzco School operated in a regulated space. Iconographic content was supervised by the Church. Local detail was, within limits, permitted. Zapata's Last Supper sits at the edge of what was permitted, and it survives because the substitution was treated as devotional inflection rather than heresy. Whether the painter intended it as an act of cultural assertion or as straightforward visual accommodation is unknowable from the work itself. The result is the same. The Last Supper of Cusco is eaten with cuy.

The second piece is the Señor de los Temblores, the Lord of the Earthquakes, the dark-skinned crucified Christ in the south transept. The figure was carved in the late sixteenth century and is associated, in local tradition, with the great earthquake of 1650. According to the account preserved in the cathedral records, the citizens of Cusco carried the figure in procession through the streets as the aftershocks continued, and the tremors stopped. The image has been the city's patron ever since. It is paraded each Easter Monday through the streets of the historic centre.

The figure is dark not by carving but by accretion. Centuries of candle smoke and incense have stained the wood and pigment to its present near-black colour. The darkening, accidental in origin, became part of the figure's identity. The Señor de los Temblores reads as Andean, as a Christ figure with the skin tone of the population that venerates him. This is not theology; it is the result of a long ritual life in a smoky interior. It is also one of the more honest examples of how a colonial religious image becomes local. The image was made for one community and altered by another.

The Maria Angola bell

In the north tower hangs the Maria Angola bell, cast in 1659. The bell weighs over six tonnes and is one of the largest historical bells in South America. The local tradition is that the bronze was alloyed with a substantial quantity of gold, donated or thrown into the molten metal by indigenous parishioners. Whether the gold content is significant in modern metallurgical terms is unclear; the chemistry of bell bronze tolerates only small additions of precious metal before tonal quality suffers. What is documented is that the bell's tone is unusually deep and that it can be heard from considerable distance on still nights. The bell is rung on major feast days and for funerals of significant figures.

What the Cathedral is for

The building is still in active use as the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Cusco. Daily Mass is celebrated. The Easter Monday procession of the Señor de los Temblores continues. The Maria Angola is rung. The Zapata Last Supper hangs in its place. The walls of red granite are the walls of an Inca palace site faced with stones from an Inca fortress, containing a painting of the central Christian rite in which the meat is local.

The compression in that sentence is the building's argument. Conquest is not a one-time event. It is a layered occupation of a single site, and each layer is visible at the next stop on the tour. The Cathedral is the densest of the layered sites in Cusco. Walk through it slowly. Every wall is two histories at once.