Qoricancha and Cusco: Inca Sun Worship beneath a Colonial Convent

In the heart of Cusco, a curved wall of perfectly fitted dark stone rises from a terraced garden, and on top of it sits the apse of a Spanish colonial church. Few places in the Americas show the meeting of two civilisations so directly. The wall belongs to the Qoricancha, the most important temple of the Inca empire, dedicated to the Sun. The church above it is Santo Domingo, built by Dominican friars on the temple’s foundations after the conquest. On Day 11 of our South American Small Group History and Culture Tour, the group visits the Qoricancha during a morning exploring Cusco’s main historical monuments, and it is the best single place to understand how Inca and colonial Cusco were built one upon the other.

The Qoricancha and the importance of the sun precinct

Qoricancha is a Quechua name usually translated as “golden enclosure”. It was the principal temple of the Inca state religion, dedicated above all to Inti, the Sun, from whom the Inca rulers claimed descent, and also to Viracocha, the creator god. According to Spanish chroniclers, the buildings around its main courtyard also held shrines to the Moon, to the planet Venus, to thunder and to the rainbow, and one space housed the preserved bodies of past Inca rulers, brought out for great ceremonies. Britannica notes that it also served as an observatory for tracking the sun and the calendar.

Inca tradition credits the ruler Pachacuti with rebuilding the temple in the fifteenth century, though the exact chronology is uncertain. The Qoricancha was more than a temple; it was the centre of the sacred geography of the Inca world. From it radiated the ceques, imaginary lines running out across the Cusco valley. The archaeologist Brian Bauer, who mapped the system on the ground in the 1990s, identified 41 or 42 of these lines, linking at least 328 shrines, or huacas: springs, rocks, hills and buildings across the valley.

Chroniclers also describe extraordinary wealth. The walls were lined with plates of gold and silver, and the temple gardens are said to have held maize plants and animals made of gold and silver, although such accounts were written by men dazzled by what they saw, or heard of, and may be exaggerated. What is certain is that the Spanish stripped the gold. Much of the treasure collected for the ransom of the Inca ruler Atahualpa in 1533 is reported to have come from the Qoricancha, and it was melted into bullion.

Precision stonework and sacred space

What survives today is the stone. The Qoricancha’s walls are among the finest examples of Inca masonry: stones cut and fitted so precisely, without mortar, that the joints are almost invisible. Builders used this fine, regularly coursed style for the most important sacred and royal buildings. Doorways, niches and windows are trapezoidal, narrower at the top than the bottom, some with double frames for emphasis, and walls lean slightly inward. Experiments by the architect Jean-Pierre Protzen showed that Inca stones of this kind could be shaped with hard hammerstones.

The best-known feature is the great curved wall on the western side, facing the garden, which now carries the end of the colonial church. It is thought to have been the base of the temple’s principal tower. The curve, built with the same precision as the straight walls, is one of the most admired pieces of Inca construction anywhere; Hiram Bingham, who brought Machu Picchu to world attention, compared it with the curved Temple of the Sun there. Our article on Machu Picchu’s architecture looks at that building and the wider engineering of the Inca royal estate.

Santo Domingo and colonial reuse

Spanish forces entered Cusco in November 1533. Within a few years the sun precinct had been handed to the Dominican order; according to the convent’s own history, Juan Pizarro granted it to the friars in 1538. They built their church and convent directly on the Inca walls, using the old temple as foundations and incorporating several of its chambers into the convent. The church was consecrated in 1633.

Earthquakes then exposed the contrast between the two building traditions. In 1650 one of the most destructive earthquakes in Peru’s history struck Cusco, and the colonial church needed major repairs while the Inca masonry stood firm. Three centuries later, in 1950, another earthquake damaged half the buildings in the city. At Santo Domingo, colonial walls cracked and the bell tower collapsed, revealing much more of the Inca temple concealed within them. UNESCO sent a mission in 1951 to advise on Cusco’s reconstruction, and over the following decades restorers uncovered and consolidated the Inca chambers, a process largely completed in the 1970s. The bell tower was rebuilt.

Visiting today, you move between the two worlds. The colonial cloister has arcades and paintings of the life of Saint Dominic; around it, restored Inca rooms with trapezoidal niches and doorways stand open, their stone walls unadorned now that the gold is gone. The Dominican order still has a role in managing the site.

How one site makes Cusco’s layered history visible

The Qoricancha is the clearest example of a pattern that runs throughout Cusco, a city UNESCO listed as a World Heritage site in 1983. The Spanish built their city on the Inca one, often literally. The cathedral stands on the site of the palace of the Inca Viracocha, and the Jesuit church of La Compañía on the palace of Huayna Capac. In the streets around the main square, colonial houses sit on Inca walls; on Hatunrumiyoc Street, a famous twelve-angled stone forms part of the wall of the palace attributed to Inca Roca.

The tour’s morning in Cusco follows that layering: Sacsayhuamán, the great ceremonial complex above the city, then the San Pedro market, the cathedral, La Compañía and Santo Domingo, ending at San Blas, the artisans’ quarter. Reading the city this way, you begin to notice which walls are Inca and which are Spanish, and how much of Cusco’s present shape still follows its Inca plan.

Is the Qoricancha included in Cusco’s tourist ticket?

Only partly. The underground site museum below the garden, off Avenida El Sol, is one of the sites covered by Cusco’s combined tourist ticket, the Boleto Turístico. The Qoricancha temple and Santo Domingo convent itself charge a separate entry. On the tour, the visit is arranged for you.

What should you look for inside the Qoricancha?

Look closely at the joints between the stones, the slight inward lean of the walls and the trapezoidal shape of every opening, then compare them with the colonial arches and plastered walls built on top. Find the curved wall from the garden below, and look up to see where the church begins. The contrast between the two styles of building is the clearest lesson the site has to offer. Cusco lies at about 3,400 metres, so take stairs slowly; by this point in the tour, the group has had several days to acclimatise.

From city fabric to the wider Andean route

The Qoricancha connects threads that run through the whole journey. Earlier, on the coast near Lima, the pilgrimage centre of Pachacamac showed how the Incas absorbed older sacred places and built their own temple of the Sun beside them. At Chinchero, a colonial church also rises on Inca foundations. After Cusco, the group takes the train across the Altiplano to Lake Titicaca and visits the Island of the Sun, where the Incas believed the sun itself was born, the other great pole of their solar religion.

Our overview of the South America cultural tour route shows how these places fit together. On the South American Small Group History and Culture Tour, a Program Leader and local guides help a small group of up to 16 travellers read Cusco’s layered history.