The Stratified City: How to See Cusco

There is a small street in central Cusco called Calle Loreto. It is two blocks long. Both of its long walls are original Inca masonry, polygonal granite blocks cut and fitted in the fifteenth century, still standing without mortar in the twenty-first. If you walk down it with your arms out, you can touch both walls at once. Above the Inca courses, on each side, sit colonial buildings. A convent on the left. A church on the right. The line where one civilization ends and the other begins is visible and continuous.

That line is the single most important thing about Cusco.

Why the line exists

When Francisco Pizarro's men entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521, they pulled down the Templo Mayor and built a cathedral on the rubble. When they took Quito in 1534, they leveled the indigenous shrines and laid out a colonial grid on flat ground. The pattern across the Spanish Americas was tear down, build over. Stone was rough, labor was cheap, and the political symbolism of a flat parcel of leveled history was useful.

In Cusco, they could not do it.

The Inca walls were technically too good. Polygonal masonry of the kind that holds up the Qorikancha foundations, the Acllahuasi at Calle Loreto, and the great enclosure at Sacsayhuaman is not stacked. It is interlocked. The faces of each block are cut on multiple planes, sometimes eight or ten, each plane fitting against an adjacent block so precisely that a sheet of paper will not slide into the joint. To demolish a wall like this you cannot simply push it. You have to break the stones, and the stones are diorite and andesite up to six tons each, and the joints distribute seismic force across so many contact points that the walls survive earthquakes that flatten the colonial buildings sitting on top of them. The 1650 earthquake destroyed much of the Dominican monastery at Qorikancha. The Inca foundations underneath did not crack.

So in Cusco the conquerors did not demolish. They built on top. The Cathedral on the Palace of Viracocha. La Compañía on Amarucancha, the palace of Huayna Capac. Santo Domingo on Qorikancha, the most sacred temple in the empire. The Convent of Santa Catalina on the Acllahuasi, the house of the Chosen Women. The colonial city is literally riding on the Inca one. The seam is at about head height on most blocks of the historic center, and once you know where to look, you cannot stop seeing it.

What the line teaches

A stratified city is read differently from a layered museum. The lower stratum was never decommissioned, just covered. The upper stratum is structurally dependent on the lower. The two are in continuous physical contact, separated only by a row of mortar where Spanish brick meets Inca diorite.

The cultural reading mirrors the physical one. Marcos Zapata's Last Supper in the Cathedral shows Jesus and his apostles eating cuy, the Andean guinea pig that has been the protein staple of the highlands for five thousand years. The painting is European in form and Andean in content. The same logic applies to the colonial saints carved in the San Blas workshops, given the long necks of llamas by indigenous artisans, and to the festival of Inti Raymi, which the Catholic Church suppressed in 1572 and which still happens every June 24th at Sacsayhuaman.

The pattern is not syncretism in the soft sense of cultures blending. It is overlay. The Andean substrate continues underneath, structurally intact. The European surface is what catches the eye. The interesting reading is always the relationship between the two.

How to walk the three tours

Cusco's three Roamer walks divide the city into the three angles from which the stratification is best seen.

The Historic Center tour traces the surface seam. Plaza de Armas was Huacaypata, the Inca civic-ceremonial square. The Cathedral sits on the Palace of Viracocha. La Compañía sits on Amarucancha. The Twelve-Angle Stone, the most famous piece of polygonal masonry in the Americas, is set into the wall of the palace of Inca Roca, who reigned around 1321 to 1348. The tour is one mile and walks the line.

The Inca Empire tour goes deeper into the Inca substrate. It starts at Qorikancha, where the walls of the most sacred temple in the empire were once lined with over seven hundred sheets of gold, all melted by the Spanish in 1533. It climbs to Sacsayhuaman, the colossal three-tier fortress where the Inca general Manco Inca besieged Spanish-occupied Cusco for ten months in 1536. Spanish Peru almost did not happen. The siege failed; the Inca state retreated to Vilcabamba and held out until 1572. Sacsayhuaman remains the strongest argument that the conquest was a closer thing than the conquistador chronicles preferred to admit.

The San Blas tour climbs into the artisan quarter on the hill above the center. San Blas is where the colonial-Andean overlay continued to produce. Workshops on the steep cobblestone streets have been working the same crafts, often within the same families, for three or four centuries. The Mendívil family still gives saints the long necks of llamas. The cedar pulpit in the church of San Blas was carved from a single trunk, by an indigenous artist whose name no record reliably preserves, over ten years.

The thing not to romanticize

The colonial city was built by extracted labor. The mita system, inherited from the Inca and intensified by the Spanish into a forced rotational labor draft, supplied workers to the silver mines at Potosí and to the construction projects in the colonial capitals. The masons who quarried Sacsayhuaman's red granite to face the Cathedral were the descendants of the masons who built Sacsayhuaman. They were paid in coca, food, and sometimes nothing.

The stratification you can read in the walls is also a stratification you can read in the demographics. Quechua is still spoken in the markets, the highlands, and the home. Spanish is the language of the church, the school, and the courthouse. The two languages overlap continuously, code-switch fluently, and remain hierarchically arranged. The Cusqueñan painter Marcos Zapata had to put cuy on the Last Supper canvas to claim the canvas at all.

A city stratified by labor extraction is not a celebration. It is a record. The honest way to walk Cusco is to read both strata at the same time, ask who built which one, and notice that the answer is sometimes the same person.

What to take with you

You will leave Cusco with the line stuck in your eye. A wall in Lima will look thinner. A wall in Madrid will look weightless. The polygonal masonry of the Inca was the densest, most precisely fitted stonework anywhere in the pre-modern world. Five hundred years of earthquakes have not moved it. The colonial buildings have collapsed and been rebuilt twice. The line holds.

That is the city.