Cusco was the capital of the largest empire in pre-Columbian America, a city of roughly 100,000 people at the height of Inca power in the early sixteenth century, built at 3,400 metres in the Andean basin with a grid of streets that radiated from the central plaza and a hydraulic system that brought fresh water from the mountains through stone channels that are still partially visible. When Francisco Pizarro’s forces arrived in 1533, they found a city whose scale and sophistication surprised them, which is evident in the letters the conquistadors sent back to Spain describing a civilisation they had not expected to encounter. They destroyed it with the thoroughness that colonial projects apply to things they need to replace, building a Spanish colonial city on the foundations of the Inca one, a process that was sometimes quite literal: the Spanish cathedral in the Plaza de Armas was constructed on the site of the palace of Inca Viracocha, and the foundations of Inca walls are visible beneath and within the colonial buildings throughout the historic centre.
The altitude takes a day to adjust to, and the adjustment is not comfortable. The thin air at 3,400 metres produces headaches in most visitors, exacerbated by any exertion, and the standard advice is to move slowly for the first twenty-four hours, drink large amounts of water, and consider coca leaves or coca tea, which the altitude medicine community has somewhat mixed views on but which the population of the Andes has been using for this purpose for centuries. The tea is available everywhere and tastes like a mild grassy infusion. Whether it works is probably a question of what “works” means in this context.
The guinea pig is not a novelty item on Cusco restaurant menus. Cuy, as it is called in Peru and elsewhere in the Andes, has been a primary protein source in Andean communities for around five thousand years, predating the Inca by several thousand years and continuing through the colonial period and into the present as the domesticated animal that produces more meat per unit of feed than cattle, pigs, or chickens in the specific conditions of the Andean plateau. The animal is cooked whole, typically, roasted or fried, and served in ways that are exactly as confronting to people who grew up keeping guinea pigs as pets as you would expect. I ate it. It tasted like a cross between rabbit and dark chicken meat, which is the description that appears in every travel account of eating cuy and which I can confirm is accurate if not particularly illuminating.
The Sacred Valley, the river valley north of Cusco running between the city and Machu Picchu, contains a concentration of Inca archaeological sites that would individually be major destinations and collectively constitute something overwhelming in its richness: the salt pans of Maras, still producing salt through evaporation from a saline spring as they have since Inca times; the concentric circular terraces of Moray, whose function is debated but which may have served as an agricultural laboratory, the different altitudes of the concentric levels creating different microclimates for crop experimentation; Ollantaytambo, the only Inca town still inhabited on its original street plan, with the massive temple fortress on the hill above it that the Spanish, unusually, failed to take. The valley rewards more time than most itineraries allow for.
When Francisco Pizarro's forces arrived in 1533, they found a city whose scale and sophistication surprised them, which is evident in the letters the conquistadors...
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