Cusco and the Sacred Valley

"Bienvenidos a la ciudad imperial del Cusco," announces the flight attendant when your plane touches down. "Welcome to the imperial city of Cusco." This royal greeting hints at what you're in for in Cusco, one of the world's great travel destinations.

The city has stood for nine centuries in this fertile Andean valley, 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level. Once the capital of the Inca empire, Cusco fell to Spanish conquistadors in 1533, when the empire was weakened from civil war. Peruvian independence was declared in 1821, and now Cusco is home to the indigenous mestizo culture of today.

According to tradition, the Inca Manco Capac and his sister-consort Mama Occlo founded the city. They envisioned Qosqo (Cusco) in the shape of a puma, the animal representation of the Earth in the indigenous cosmos, which is evident today if someone traces the animal outline for you on a city map. But not all was Inca in southern Peru, a point that gets lost in the tourist trek from one Inca ruin to the next. The presence not far from Cusco of Pikillacta, a pre-Inca city constructed by the Wari culture that thrived between AD 600 and 1000, is an indication that this territory, like most of Peru, was the site of sophisticated civilizations long before the Inca appeared.

By the time Francisco Pizarro and the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532, the Inca empire had spread from modern-day Ecuador in the north down through Peru and Bolivia to Chile. How did such a vast empire fall to a few hundred Spaniards? At the time, the empire, though large, was divided and severely weakened by a civil war. The Spanish brought guns and horses, which the Inca had never seen, and new diseases, against which they had no immunity. The Spanish seized Atahualpa, the recently instated Inca ruler who was in Cajamarca to subdue rebellious forces, and the rest of the population was quickly overwhelmed.

After the 1532 conquest of the Inca empire, the new colonists overlaid a new political system and new religion onto the old. They also superimposed their architecture, looting the gold, silver, and stone, and grafting their own churches, monasteries, convents, and palaces onto the foundations of the Inca sites. The juxtaposition can be jarring. The Santo Domingo church was built on top of the Qorikancha, the Temple of the Sun. And it's downright ironic to think of the cloistered convent of Santa Catalina occupying the same site as the equally cloistered Acllawasi, the home of the Inca chosen women, who were selected to serve the sun in the Qorikancha temple. The cultural combination appears in countless other ways: witness the pumas carved into the cathedral doors. The city also gave its name to the Cusqueña school of art, in which New World artists combined Andean motifs with European-style painting, usually on religious themes. You'll chance on paintings that could be by Van Dyck but for the Inca robes on New Testament figures, and last supper diners digging into an Andean feast of guinea pig and fermented corn beer.

Throughout the Cusco region, you'll witness this odd juxtaposition of imperial and colonial, indigenous and Spanish. Traditionally clad Quechua-speaking women sell their wares in front of a part-Inca, part-colonial structure as a business executive of European heritage walks by carrying on a cell-phone conversation. The two cultures coexist, but have not entirely embraced each other even five centuries after the conquest.

The Río Urubamba passes, at its closest, about 30 km (18 mi) north of Cusco and flows through a valley about 300 meters (980 feet) lower in elevation than Cusco. The northwestern part of this river basin, romantically labeled the Sacred Valley of the Inca, contains some of the region's most appealing towns and fascinating pre-Columbian ruins. A growing number of visitors are heading here directly upon arrival in Cusco to acclimatize. The valley's altitude is slightly lower and its temperatures slightly higher, and make for a physically easier introduction to this part of Peru.

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