Qorikancha (Coricancha, Temple of the Sun)

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A line of fitted ashlar runs along the Calle del Sol in Cusco, gray andesite laid without mortar, the joints so close a knife will not enter them, and the wall curves — a smooth tapering apse, the only major curved face in Inca architecture. Above it rises the painted stucco and bell tower of a Dominican church. The stone is older. Below the church floor and behind its cloister, the same masonry encloses a courtyard and a row of small trapezoidal chambers, and this enclosure was once the most concentrated point of sacred value in the Andean world: Qorikancha, the golden enclosure, from Quechua quri (gold) and kancha (walled compound). The Spanish wrote it Coricancha. It was the temple of Inti, the sun, and the precise center from which the ritual geography of Tawantinsuyu was measured.

The golden enclosure

Qorikancha sits at the lower, eastern end of Cusco, where the Saphi and Tullumayu canalized rivers converge — the tail of the puma whose body the city was laid out to form, with Sacsayhuamán as its head. An earlier sanctuary on the spot, the Intikancha, belonged to the foundational period of the Cusco dynasty; the enclosure took its mature gold-sheathed form under Pachacuti, the ninth ruler, who from around 1438 rebuilt Cusco as the capital of an expanding state and made its temple the architectural argument for that state’s claim. The masonry of the surviving walls is the finest the Inca produced, the courses graded and the blocks coursed in the imperial style reserved for the highest sacred and royal building, the same idiom that distinguishes the royal estate at Machu Picchu and the terraces of Ollantaytambo.

The compound was a kancha of the highest rank: a wall enclosing a central court around which stood a row of single-room shrines. Six chambers are described in the colonial record, dedicated to the powers of the visible sky. The largest belonged to Inti. The others held the moon; the stars together with the planet Venus, named Chaska, the bright morning and evening star; and the weather — Illapa, the conjoined power of thunder, lightning, and the bolt, and Cuichu, the rainbow that arched between earth and sky. The creator, Viracocha, was honored apart, set above this family rather than housed among it. The Inca did not separate astronomy from theology; the chambers of Qorikancha were a model of the sky rendered as a house, and the deities who lived in them were the same lights that crossed the Cusco horizon. Priests and the aclla, the chosen women dedicated to the sun and moon, served the chambers and tended their fires and offerings. The solar cult itself, Inti and the Sapa Inca as his son, belongs to Inca religion; here it was given a roof.

What every conquistador who entered remembered was the gold. The walls of the principal hall were sheathed top to bottom in plates of beaten gold; the chronicler Pedro Cieza de León put the number above seven hundred. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Cusco in 1539 to an Inca ñusta and a Spanish captain and writing the Comentarios reales from memory and family testimony, described all four walls of the great chamber covered in gold from cornice to floor. Beyond the hall lay an enclosed garden in which maize was reproduced at life size in gold and silver — stalk, leaf, and cob — alongside figures of llamas, herders, and birds, a permanent metallic harvest that did not depend on the rains. In Andean idiom gold was the sweat of the sun and silver the tears of the moon; the sheathing was not ornament but the substance of the deity made manifest on the wall, which is why its later removal registered as desecration rather than mere theft.

The Punchao

The chief image of Inti was not the wall but a single object: the Punchao, the word for the day or the high midday sun. It was a figure of gold worked as a young seated child, crowned with a royal headband and fitted with ear-spools and a pectoral, set so that the rising sun struck it and the polished metal threw the light back into the chamber. Each dawn it was carried out to meet the sun and each evening returned within. The Punchao was hollow, and its cavity held a paste compounded from the burned hearts of the dead rulers — so the living essence of every Sapa Inca was gathered into the body of the sun-child, the dynasty folded into its god.

When Cusco fell the Punchao did not. It was carried into the forested refuge of Vilcabamba, where the neo-Inca state held out for nearly four decades, and it was finally taken in 1572 when that last redoubt was overrun and the ruler Túpac Amaru captured and executed. The image was sent across the Atlantic toward the Spanish crown, and after that the record fails: no surviving object can be identified with it. The most sustained study of the Punchao’s history and types is the work of the ethnohistorian Pierre Duviols, who reconstructed it from the scattered chronicle descriptions rather than from any survival.

The hall of the moon and the royal dead

Beside the chamber of the sun stood the chamber of Mama Killa, the moon, sister and consort of Inti. Where Inti’s hall was gold, hers was lined with beaten silver, the wall carrying the cold light as the other carried the hot. The moon’s hall was also the resting place of the most venerated of the dead. The mummified bodies of past queens — and, in the cult of the royal ancestors that organized so much of Inca political life, the preserved rulers themselves — were kept, attended, dressed, fed, and brought out to the great festivals as living members of the court. A dead Inca did not relinquish his estate; his panaca, the corporate lineage of his descendants, maintained his body and his lands in perpetuity, a practice whose economic and dynastic logic belongs to the empire at large. Qorikancha was where that logic touched the sky: the ancestors lay among the heavenly powers, and the noon disk that held their burned hearts was carried out each morning to greet their father.

The ceque system: a calendar drawn on the land

From Qorikancha the sacred order of the Cusco valley radiated outward along a set of conceptual sightlines called ceques (from Quechua siq’i, a line or mark). Forty-one or forty-two ceques ran from the temple toward the horizon, grouped into the four quarters whose name the empire bore — Tawantinsuyu, the four parts united. Strung along these lines were the huacas: springs, stones, fields, bridges, tombs, and crossings, places where the sacred concentrated, each assigned to a particular kin group or office for its upkeep and offerings. The number of huacas recorded is about three hundred and twenty-eight. The system was set down in the sixteenth century by the Spanish administrator Polo de Ondegardo and preserved in fullest form by the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo of 1653, who listed the lines and their shrines one by one — the single richest document of Andean sacred geography to survive.

The twentieth-century ethnohistorian R. Tom Zuidema read this catalog not as a map alone but as a calendar laid over the ground. The figure of 328 is close to twelve sidereal lunar months — the time the moon takes to return to the same star, about 27.3 days — and close, too, to the span across the year when the Pleiades stand above the Cusco horizon, the cluster passing out of sight for roughly the remaining thirty-seven days of the solar year. If each huaca answered to a day, the ceque system encoded a sidereal-lunar count tied to the visible motion of the heavens, walked and worshiped rather than written down — a calendar whose pages were stones in the fields and whose keeper was the kin group responsible for each line. The Pleiades carried particular weight: in Quechua the cluster is Qullqa, the storehouse or granary, and its heliacal rising in June — its first reappearance in the dawn after weeks of invisibility — opened the agricultural year and timed the planting; the sharpness with which the cluster rose was read as a forecast of the coming harvest. The archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni has shown how horizon markers around Cusco fixed the solstices and the zenith passages of the sun against this lunar and stellar count. Qorikancha was the instrument’s origin: the point from which the lines were drawn, the sun observed, and the calendar kept.

Older stone, older cult

The masonry tradition that reached its summit in Qorikancha did not begin with the Inca. In the Cusco basin the Killke culture, ancestral to the Inca and active from roughly 900 to 1200, raised the earliest walls beneath later Inca sites and supplies the local continuity on which the imperial builders drew. Further back and further south, the great Andean centers had already made monumental cult architecture and a theology of celestial and creator powers: Tiwanaku on the shore of Lake Titicaca, whose staff-bearing deity and dressed-stone gateways the Inca wove into their own origin story of Viracocha rising from the lake; the highland empire of Wari with its planned compounds and roads; and earlier still Chavín, whose carved sanctuary set an Andean pattern of the temple as a converging point for pilgrimage and oracle. Qorikancha stood within that long inheritance, the imperial perfection of an old Andean idea — that a worked enclosure of stone could gather the powers of sky and land into one place. The Inca distinguished it sharply from the other great Andean shrine they had absorbed, the coastal oracle of Pachacamac, whose creator-deity Pacha Kamaq spoke through a wooden idol and answered questions; Qorikancha was not an oracle but a center — it did not speak, it measured.

Scholarship and the colonial record

What can be known of Qorikancha as a working temple comes almost entirely from texts written after it had been stripped, by men who had a stake in how it was remembered. The fullest inventory of its sacred geography is the ceque list of Bernabé Cobo, whose Historia del Nuevo Mundo (completed 1653) drew on the lost report of Polo de Ondegardo; the indispensable modern edition and translation is John Howland Rowe’s “An Account of the Shrines of Ancient Cuzco” (Ñawpa Pacha 17, 1979), which restored the ceque catalog to scholarly use. The temple’s wealth and ritual life are described by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in the Comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisbon, 1609) from a Cusco childhood and a deliberate Renaissance frame, and by the early conquest chroniclers Pedro Cieza de León and Pedro Sancho. A general account of the temple, its gold, and its conversion to the convent is given in Mark Cartwright’s entry for the World History Encyclopedia, and the metalwork that clad it — the meaning of gold as the sun’s sweat — is treated in the Yale Material and Visual Cultures of Religion study of Inca naturalistic gold. The astronomical reading of the ceque system was built across three decades by R. Tom Zuidema, beginning with The Ceque System of Cuzco (1964) and extended in his and Anthony Aveni’s archaeoastronomy of the Cusco horizon; the lost Punchao is reconstructed in Pierre Duviols’s study of the idol and its types. The deeper Andean origins of its masonry and cult are read against the record of Killke, Tiwanaku, and Wari.

The overbuilding

The gold went first. After Atahualpa was seized at Cajamarca in November 1532, the ransom he offered — a room filled once with gold and twice with silver — was drawn in part from Qorikancha; envoys sent down from the temple stripped the plates from the walls, carried them north over the highland road, and they were melted into ingots through 1533 and parceled out in shares. The garden of golden maize went the same way, into the furnace. Atahualpa was executed in July of that year despite the ransom paid. The enclosure itself passed to the Dominican order — Juan Pizarro, brother of Francisco, granted it in 1534, with the transfer formalized in 1538 — and the Convent of Santo Domingo was raised directly on the Inca foundations, its church anchored to the curved wall of the sun temple. Twice the colonial building came down and twice the stone beneath it did not. The earthquake of 1650 leveled much of Spanish Cusco; the curved Inca wall stood. The earthquake of 1950 brought down more than half the city, the church among it; the curved wall stood again, and the colonial fabric was rebuilt a third time on the same Inca courses, this time with sections of the original masonry deliberately exposed. Mass is said in the convent above; the trapezoidal niches of the sun’s chamber open onto the cloister, swept and empty. The golden enclosure keeps its lower courses beneath the church that replaced it, the two structures fused at the foundation into a single standing object — Andean stone bearing the European nave that could not have stood without it.

→ Related: Inca Empire Tawantinsuyu · Inca Religion Inti Viracocha · Sacsayhuaman · Machu Picchu · Ollantaytambo · Cajamarca Inca City · Pachacamac Oracle · Killke Culture · Tiwanaku · Wari · Chavin · Pleiades