Pachacutec
November 3, 2006 Culture & History, Cusco Guide, Opinion
Pachacutec was the Inca emperor who turned Cuzco from a city state to an empire that spanned from Ecuador to Chile. At one end of the Av. El Sol is a gigantic statue of him that you can visit and climb.
We did and got excellent views. By far the most interesting of which was a llama. We had seen it before we had climbed the statue, eating grass in the small park that the statue stands in. Now we were at the top, we watched it casually stroll out of the park and onto the busy main road. Walking through the traffic, it reached the other side, where it went off down another street. Sure the animal was escaping and about to get itself killed, we went back down and told the guard who sits inside the statues base at the staircase. Quite deaf, he had no clue what we were talking about. “Where do you want to go?”, he asked. Finally we made him understand. “Don’t worry”, he said, “he knows where he lives, he always comes back”.
We decided to head off in the direction the llama took and managed to catch up with it. We found it in a small street eating a bush growing at the side of the road. Here a passer-by saw us taking a photo, interested in what we were doing, he told us that he often sees the llama eating this bush, it was his favourite, and that the grass around the statue can’t be that good. Apparently the llama takes his little journey several times a day, the locals are used to seeing it, and the drivers are used to seeing it walk out in front of them.
All quite normal for Cusco.
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[...] Pachacútec, expander of the empire, ordered the site’s construction in the mid-1400’s. The complex took almost 100 years to complete with thousands of men. Many of the blocks were taken from as far as 32km away. Some blocks are the size of large buses and weigh hundreds of tons. No-one knows how they managed to move them, not even how they managed to cut the bricks with laser-precision. All that survives of the place is what the Spanish weren’t able to destroy – what they didn’t have the technology to destroy. What you see in my photos is a mere 20% of what once stood here. [...]
[...] and in the Urubamba valley which descends into the Amazon, was build around 1450 in the time of Emperor Pachacutec. It was abandoned in the time of the Spanish conquest, not because the Spanish found it, but [...]
[...] to Ollantaytambo, a town that was part city, part fort and part rural retreat for the great Inca Pachacutec who ordered its construction. The Spanish followed, after themselves haven suffered heavy loses. [...]
[...] Inca Emperor Pachacutec conquered a vast area from Chile to Ecuador forming the Tahuantinsuyu. He then sent his son, Túpac [...]