Choquequirao
Interesting facts
- The name is usually translated as Cradle of Gold, joining the Aymara word choqe, gold, with the Quechua k'iraw, cradle.
- The white llama figures in the terrace walls stand between about 1.25 and 1.94 metres tall, made of pale quartz sandstone set against dark schist.
- A zigzag band of white stone on the uppermost terrace is in Chachapoya style, hinting that workers from that distant northern people helped build the site.
- The Giant Stairway, 25 metres long and 4.4 metres wide, ends abruptly partway down the hill; its boulders light up fully at the December solstice sunrise.
- Local quarries yielded only metamorphic rock unsuited to fine Inca masonry, so walls were plastered with clay and painted a light orange.
- When Hiram Bingham explored the ruins in 1909, he found spots where treasure hunters had already used dynamite in search of Inca gold.
- In the 1830s the French diplomat Eugène de Sartiges explored the ruins, decades before Bingham and long after the site had vanished into the forest.
- Before the 1710 Spanish memorial resurfaced in 1973, the oldest known description of the site was one by the cartographer Cosme Bueno in 1768.
- The ancient approach from Cusco crossed the Yanama pass at about 4,670 metres, a journey estimated at seven to ten days.
Why it is worth it
Choquequirao sits on a spur above the canyon of the Apurímac River, at about 3,050 m, with the river some 1,600 m below. It is one of the most dramatic sites the Incas built, and one of the least visited, because for now the only way in is on foot. From its terraces the land drops away into the gorge, so that the setting rivals Machu Picchu, with which it is often compared and sometimes called a sister city.
The ruins are spread over a huge area, around 1,800 hectares, and only part has been cleared from the forest – estimates put the excavated share at a third or so. What has been uncovered includes ceremonial plazas, halls and houses, canals and fountains that brought water from a stream some four kilometres away, and a usnu, a ceremonial platform built on a levelled hilltop. Most striking are the agricultural terraces that step down the slopes, some of them decorated with figures of llamas made in white stone set into the darker walls: a file of more than twenty animals climbing the hillside, with a single herder at the bottom – a design known from no other Inca site.
Choquequirao was probably founded under the emperor Pachacuti and enlarged by his son Topa Inca Yupanqui, and it was built in two main phases. After the Spanish conquest it lay within the territory held by the last independent Inca rulers of Vilcabamba, who resisted for decades from these mountains, and it was abandoned around 1590. The first written mention of the site comes from a Spanish memorial of 1710 by Juan Arias Díaz; Hiram Bingham visited in 1909, two years before he reached Machu Picchu, and found groups of buildings and mummified remains.
The isolation is part of its character. The approach involves descending well over a kilometre in height into the canyon, crossing the Apurímac and climbing all the way back up the other side, and those who make the trek often have the ruins almost to themselves – a rare thing among the great sites of the Andes.
Getting there
The usual trailhead is the village of Cachora in Apurímac, about four hours' drive from Cusco; from there a trail of roughly 30 km down into the Apurímac canyon and up again reaches the site, and most people allow at least two days each way, four or five for the round trip. The town of Abancay lies about 27 km away as the crow flies. The nearest airport is Cusco's Alejandro Velasco Astete International (CUZ), about 100 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Choquequirao is a 16th-century Incan site in the Cusco Region of southern Peru. Often called the "sister city" of Machu Picchu due to its similar structure and architecture, the site consists of an extensive complex of buildings and agricultural terraces built around the Sunch'u Pata, the truncated hill top, on a steep mountainside overlooking the Apurímac River. The ruins are situated in the Santa Teresa district at an elevation of 3,050 metres in the rugged Vilcabamba mountain range. The site overlooks the Apurimac River canyon that has an elevation of 1,450 metres (4,760 ft).
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
-13.39474, -72.87224per Wikidata