The Qorikancha, the golden enclosure, was the principal temple of the Inca state and the point from which its sacred geography was measured. Spanish witnesses describe walls sheathed in gold plate, a garden of worked metal plants, and chambers for the sun, the moon, thunder and the rainbow. It also housed the mummified bodies of dead rulers, who were not buried but kept, dressed, brought out at festivals, consulted, and served food and drink by attendants from their own lineage, since a dead Inca retained his lands and his household.
From the temple an arrangement of lines, the ceques, radiated across the valley. Colonial accounts, above all the list preserved by the Jesuit Bernabe Cobo, record about forty lines carrying more than three hundred shrines between them, huacas that might be a spring, a stone, a bend in a river, a place where something had happened. Each line was the responsibility of a named kin group, so the system distributed the duty of offering across the whole society and mapped social organisation onto the landscape at the same time. Several lines were oriented to horizon points at solstices and to the rising of particular stars, which tied the ritual calendar to the agricultural one.
Bringing these strands together, the temple was not simply a building the Inca worshipped in. It was the hub of a machine for keeping time, ancestry, water and kinship in one order, which is why the conquerors could dismantle the cult by taking a single site.