Inti Raymi's modern revival began in 1944, when a group led by the writer and actor Faustino Espinoza Navarro staged a public reenactment in Cusco based directly on Garcilaso de la Vega's three century old written description, an act of deliberate cultural reclamation undertaken during a period of growing Peruvian indigenista interest in reasserting Andean and Inca heritage within a national identity that had long marginalized it. The reenactment drew on the only detailed source available, making the festival as celebrated today a considered reconstruction built from a colonial era chronicle rather than an unbroken performance tradition passed down since Inca times.
The modern ceremony unfolds across three major Inca sites in sequence: it opens at Qorikancha, the Temple of the Sun in central Cusco, moves to the main plaza for a ceremonial address, and concludes with the largest and most elaborate staging at the hilltop fortress of Sacsayhuaman above the city, where costumed performers reenact sacrifice, dance and the sun's veneration before large public and increasingly international audiences.
Inti Raymi today functions simultaneously as a major tourist spectacle, a serious act of Quechua and Andean cultural assertion, and, for some participants and observers, a genuine devotional observance, three registers that coexist without a clean separation between them, a combination this atlas's account of the festival treats honestly rather than resolving into a single simple description of what the modern celebration is for.