Sacred Valley of the Incas - Land of Ancient Culture & Legends

As a primer to our 4 day Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu, we visited the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco and the nearby Sacred Valley of the Incas. This was the heart of the Inca empire, which amazingly lasted less than 200’s years before the Spanish conquering in the mid 1500’s.

In the Incas’ relatively short period of expansion, they accomplished some amazing feats.

• The empire stretched from the north in present day Columbia, to the Amazon jungle in the east, to Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador in the heartland, and as far south as present day Chile.

• The Incas built a vast network of roads – much like the Romans system of stone roads – only they did so in a much shorter period of time.

• The agricultural sophistication and technology was extremely advanced. The Incan terracing, irrigation, and other engineering allowed them to feed enormous numbers of people within the empire.

• The stone work and construction displayed by the Inca craftsmen still stands to this day. During the frequent earthquakes that rattle Peru and surrounding areas, European designed structures have been repeatedly toppled and rebuilt, while many of the Incan foundations built over 1000 years ago still stand because of their sound understanding of physics and construction.

• The Incas possessed a superior knowledge of astronomy and used it to create astronomical phenomena in their temples - through use of sunlight and stars, primarily on important days like the equinoxes (June 21, December 21).

I could go on and on with the fascinating history and culture of the Inca’s, but you get the picture that the stories and information we learned was as fascinating as the ruins themselves.

The Sacred Valley of the Incas is a string of towns stretching approximately 50 miles between Cuzco, the Incan capital, and Machu Piccu – a once lost city straddling a mountain in a sub-tropical area. Ruins are everywhere, but we visited a few key ones.


Pisac: The first town was called Pisac. It was probably only used as a religious center, as opposed to a mixture of religious and urban or political. The picture below shows us above the primary area of ruins:
This is a partially restored temple of the Sun God – the most important god for the Incas.


During the Spanish conquest of the Incas, not only did they take over political functions, but the Spanish had a strong push to convert the people’s religion to Christianity. In order to do this, the Spaniards destroyed any of the temples they found. Interestingly, one reason Machu Picchu is so amazing is that the Spaniards never found it – thus preserving much of the original structures.

This picture is of ½ of an Incan Cross. It is a very important symbol that represents the three levels of existence- the upper world inhabited by superior gods, the world of our everyday existence and the underworld inhabited by spirits of the dead, ancestors, their overlords and various deities in close contact with the earth plane. The location of this stone is important because on the 22nd of June the sunlight hitting this stone creates a shadow that is a perfect geometrical opposite of the stone. The stone and shadow together make the shape of the Inca cross.


Chad standing in doorway of one ruin in Pisac.


Ollaytantambo (try to say that one fast): The final ruin we saw on our 1-day tour of the Sacred Valley was probably the most spectacular – Ollaytantambo. According to our tour guide, the site was probably less than 50% complete at the time of the Spanish arrival.
In the middle of this photo on the left side of the rock you can see the outline of face carved in the mountain by the Incas. On June 22, a ray of light comes exactly from the point of its eyes and hits an important part of the sun temple in the complex.


This is another face carved in the side of the mountain. The actual sizes of these faces are enormous – kind of like an Incan version of Mount Rushmore.


The most amazing thing to us were the enormous stones carved and moved to this site … get this … from another mountain across the valley! Apparently this was the site they wanted, but they didn’t have a quarry with the right rocks here, so they brought the enormous rocks 1000’s of feet down and then back up. How? I have no idea.



Once there, the rocks were placed on jig-saw puzzle like foundations to keep them in place:

The precision with which the stones are placed is incredible.

Final Stop: Our final destination was a small town with local artisans and a neat old church. The most interesting part of the church was that it was built completely on foundations from Inca buildings (see stones on bottom of next picture):

As we left, we captured an amazing scene above the church:


Our next step of the journey was the famous 4 day Inca trail.