Cusco

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.

After 1533 the Dominicans built their church and convent directly on the Qorikancha, keeping the Inca masonry as a foundation. The royal mummies were hunted down and removed to Lima, and campaigns to extirpate idolatry pursued the huacas across the southern Andes through the following century, prompting movements of refusal such as the Taki Onqoy of the 1560s, in which preachers announced that the old huacas were returning to drive out the invaders. The earthquake of 1650 and again that of 1950 brought down colonial walls and left the Inca stonework standing, a fact local memory has never treated as accidental.

What survived did so inside Catholic forms. The Corpus Christi procession of Cusco carries fifteen saints and virgins through the streets from the outlying parishes, each with its own following, in a pattern that colonial observers already compared to the carrying of the mummies. Inti Raymi, the June solstice festival of the sun, was suppressed and then reconstructed in 1944 as a staged pageant at Sacsayhuaman above the city, performed in Quechua and now a fixture of the civic year.

The pilgrimage of Qoyllur Riti climbs to a glacier at nearly five thousand metres before Corpus Christi, drawing tens of thousands. Its focus is a painted image of Christ on a rock, approached by nations of dancers from the surrounding provinces, and policed by masked ukukus who once cut ice from the glacier to carry home. It was inscribed on the UNESCO intangible heritage list in 2011, and the ice cutting has been curtailed as the glacier retreats.