TravelMole’s Silvia Garcia Cusco Adventure – Part 4

We are inside Machu Picchu [right] feeling slightly dizzy after climbing just a few steep steps.

We tell Juanita, our local guide, to take the walk easy. We need a few sitting down minutes for altitude acclimatization, and digesting efficiently the information on the Inca history.

I crawl up agitated to admire the ruins lying strechted out before me, containing exceptional stone and ornamental work, with an organized adminstrative and housing distribution system, a complete civilization of its time. 

Hundreds of men transported large heavy stoneblocks to map, build and carve the city. It’s known they didn’t use the wheel,  an  scenario I have difficulty imagining with today’s construction technology.

Machu Picchu, is the best-known archaelogical site in South America.

According to archaeologists, the urban sector of Machu Picchu was divided into three great districts, the Sacred District, the Popular District, and the District of the Priests and the Nobility.

The space is composed of 140 constructions including temples, sanctuaries, parks and residences, which once had thatched roofs.

There are more than one hundred flights of stone steps, many carved from a single block of granite.

There are also water fountains interconnected by channels and water-drainages perforated in the rock, designed for irrigation and distribution.

The city was connected by diverse passages, paths and hundreds of stairs that permitted people to climb and descend this city constructed on a steep hill. 

Juanita leads us through the agricultural sector, containing the first visible ruins of the Inca city. We walk along the agricultural terraces [above], differing in size and shape, they descend from atop the hill. They were used for crop growing while also functioning in impeding water erosion caused by the intense rains.

Exploring the area, we arrive at the middle of a flight of stairs that separate all three districts. Juanita asks, “guys it’s your call to either start hiking up or down”, but considering its length and tall steep steps ‘down’ was the unanimous response.

Some steps down, we visit the Temple of the Condor, a breathtaking example of Inca stonemasonry.

The Inca skillfully shaped a rock formation into the outspread wings of a condor in flight, [right] and on the rock floor of the temple they carved the shape of the condor’s head and neck, completing the figure of a three-dimensional bird.

It’s believed the condor was used as a sacrificial altar.

The Prison Group stands directly behind the temple, and is a labyrinthian complex of cells, niches, and passages under and above the ground entered by bending double [below].

According to historical chronicles, an accused citizen would be sent to the niches for up to three days to await the deliberation of his fate, and be put to death for sins such as laziness, lust, or theft.

Southeast of the Prison is the Cluster of Mortars, known as the industrial area.

There a two metre high walls built of well carved stone.

The walls contain a room with two round mortars in it. Both have the same diameter and type of carving, and historians say it was used for milling different products, or for weaving or making pottery as an ‘industrial’ activity.

Next door was the Residential Area, of rougher constructions, it  had houses for Machu Picchu residents.

Above is the the Central Plaza or square, which separates the ceremonial area of Machu Picchu from the more mundane residential and industrial areas.

We climb up the steep hill and find the Intihuatana (from Quechua meaning ‘hitching post of the sun’). It’s a carved rock pillar, which Inca astronomers used in rituals to secure the presence of the sun during the shortest day of the year (winter solstice).

Through this rock pillar the Incas could identify the sun in its extreme solstices and moreover give useful information for agriculture in respect to the time to plant and harvest. Juanita accentuates astrological observation and cosmology as advanced in Inca times. They also could anticipate the eclipses, they knew the phases of the moon and position of the stars, and believed in their own constellations.