September 4, 2024
Our tour guide, Dennis, arrived at the hotel at 7 am to collect us for our private, all-day tour of the Sacred Valley. After a 45-minute drive, we arrived in Chinchero, a small Peruvian town at 3760 meters (12,336 feet) featuring Incan ruins and colonial 17th-century structures built on top of the destroyed ancient walls. The district is the center of Peruvian weaving; several local, traditionally dressed women explained and demonstrated the intricacies of harvesting, dying and preparing llama wool for weaving. It turns out this demonstration is one of several sites connected to the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco (CTTC), the museum we came across in Cusco. A little corny, but the beautiful artistry is quite impressive. We purchased several textiles from their enormous shop before continuing.
The next stop, another half hour further into the valley, was Moray, the ruins of an Incan agricultural testing laboratory at about 3400 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level. Moray comprises three crater-like depressions, each with several circular terraces of varying sizes and depths, with an integrated irrigation system believed to have been used to grow hundreds of varieties of crops, including corn, grains, and potatoes, in various conditions. The terraces descend about 150 meters (490 feet); each of the three circular structures has about 12 levels of terraces, and the largest has a diameter of about 182 meters (600 feet). Moray is also quite an engineering feat, built using intricate stone masonry dating back to the 13th century. Unbelievable!
Nearby, San Francisco de Maras, a town of about 50,000 people, is known for its ancient salt mines, which have been used since Incan times. We drove down several switchbacks into a valley below Maras to view thousands of “pozos,” or wells, placed in the form of terraces that stretch down the entire valley as far as one can see, occupying a total area of approximately 1.5 to 2 hectares (4 to 5 acres). Each pozo is formed with retaining walls of small stones sealed with natural clay mortar, forming dikes of approximately 5m2 (54 square feet). The valley of pozos is flooded with saltwater fed by a hypersaline underground spring that originated 110 million years ago during the formation of the Andes Mountains. The salt dries according to weather conditions and is harvested by the local owners and sold in Peru and presumably worldwide. When the Spanish invaded the surrounding communities and discovered the mines, the settlers developed thousands more, copying the existing antique pozos over the ensuing centuries. Ownership of each pozo has been passed down from generation to generation, and today, they are still mined by individual families. Once a year, they hold a salt festival called Kachi Raymi, a celebration of the harvest and a spiritual celebration of the natural world.
We ate lunch at a relatively touristy stop, but it was a relief to relax for an hour out of the hot sun. We enjoyed the local cuisine and cold, refreshing chicha morada.
Afterward, we drove about 40 minutes further into the Valley to Ollantaytambo, another important archeological Incan site from around the same period, when, in the 15th century, Pachacútec continued to transform his chiefdom into an Empire. Pachacutec rebuilt the town, which provided lodging for the Inca nobility, and his men farmed the terraces leading to the Temple at the top.
Today, Ollantaytambo is an Incan-colonial city at 2790 meters (9150 feet) that still maintains its layout and culture from the Incan period and its language, Quechua. It is a “dead” city, meaning few people still actually live there, and most of the houses have colonial architecture built by the Spanish on top of Incan ruins. But the ceremonial Temple of the Sun, made up of stone pieces that weigh as much as 100 tons atop a steep series of terraces, is more intact and a site to behold!
We spent several hours climbing to the top of the ruins, which was a challenging hike in altitude and very windy and dusty conditions; it was straight up! The walls are mainly intact throughout, including at least fifteen or more agricultural terrace levels, and it was easy to discern the apparent differences between the pre-Incan, lower fifth of each section, and the Incan structures built on top. Again, the precision of the Incan construction (perfectly positioned stones and identically sized windows, for example) was mind-boggling! From the unfinished Temple of the Sun at the top, we had a breathtaking view of the town below and the opposing mountain with its grain storehouses, called qullqas, built right into the top third of its cliff-like walls. The Temple of the Sun featured massive slabs of stone, hauled up from miles away by hundreds of men, a feat that took decades, seemingly impossible, even by today’s construction standards.
Of course, the descent was again much easier than the accent, and we were content to nap on the 90-minute ride back to Cusco after a tour of an ancient place unlike anything we had ever seen. And there is so much more to see when we inevitably return!
The link to the photos and videos for day 4 is here: Cusco Day 4