Along the Inca Road

March 31st - Cusco

Our final structured morning took us to the site of Qoricancha, or what's left of it. When the Spanish arrived in the valley they found this gold covered temple and they quickly went to work removing all the gold. Today all that is left is the stonework and most of that is just remnants of what use to be a large ceremonial complex. The Dominican order used many of the original stones to construct the church of Santo Domingo. Like all inca structures, the original walls were made using no mortar and utilizing the trapazodial doorways and walls. The area around the cathedral and the central Plaza de Armas still has many examples of Inca construction.

The old and news, Hispanic style.

Details of temple's wall.

The cathedral's grounds and a detail of how the Inca fitted their stonework with cut incisions and grooves.

More recovered Inca sites in downtown Cusco including a mummy found during reconstruction.

A vicuña and llama in the downtown sites.

Cusco's Plaza de Armas.

Museo Historico Regional - Cusco's regional historical museum. It has a collection of items that are pre-Columbian to the present.

The Black Christ in a skirt, an icon of Cusco and the interior of the regional musuem.

Joan checking out the Plaza de Armas on our last day. So ended our four days in Cusco, non-stop and certainly not boring.

Tomorrow we head for Lima to catch the midnight plane back to the states.

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