The capital and sacred center of the Inca empire, high in the Peruvian Andes — a planned city the Incas called the navel of the world, rebuilt in monumental stone in the fifteenth century, seized by the Spanish in 1533 and overbuilt with churches and mansions raised directly on its Inca foundations.
The Inca capital was often glossed as the navel of the world, and they meant it as a map. Cusco was not only a seat of power but a diagram of the cosmos: a city said to have been laid out, by tradition, in the shape of a puma, divided into an upper half and a lower half, and ringed by lines of shrines that radiated out across the empire like spokes. From its great sun temple, sheathed in gold, the sacred order of the Andes was supposed to begin. Then in 1533 the Spanish took the city, and they did something that still defines it. They did not level the Inca stonework. They built on top of it. Walk Cusco today and the lower courses of many walls are Inca, fitted so tightly that no blade slips between them, while the colonial city rises directly above. The Andean past here was not buried. It was made load-bearing.