Parque archeologico national Ollantaytambo

Ollantaytambo is an Inca town and temple complex in the Sacred Valley, on the old Inca road towards Machu Picchu. Above the town, the great terraces of Pumatallis climb the steep flank of Cerro Bandolista to a ceremonial centre built of huge blocks of rose-coloured rhyolite, while the valley floor below is still laid out on the Inca street grid. It is one of the few places where people continue to live in houses whose stone walls and courtyards date from the fifteenth century.

The site was occupied long before the Incas, but around the middle of the fifteenth century the emperor Pachacuti conquered the existing town, razed it and rebuilt it as the centre of his personal estate. He had the Urubamba valley terraced and irrigated; the terraces here were built to an unusually high standard, with tall walls of cut stone, and were worked by the emperor's retainers while the town housed members of the Inca nobility. On the main grid, each block was formed of walled compounds with buildings around a central courtyard. South of the town, a sunken strip of terraces about 700 metres long creates a sheltered microclimate a few degrees warmer than the ground around it, which allowed crops from lower altitudes to grow. Storehouses with ventilation openings stand on the surrounding hillsides, and the stone for the temple was hauled from quarries at Kachiqhata, about 5 km away across the river, along ramps and roads still marked by abandoned blocks.

The Temple Hill is often called the fortress because of its formidable terraces, but its main purpose was religious. Its finest part, the temple sector, includes the Enclosure of the Ten Niches and the unfinished Sun Temple with its Wall of the Six Monoliths, a row of giant fitted slabs. The many half-worked blocks scattered around show that construction was still under way when the site was abandoned. During the Spanish conquest the town became the stronghold of Manco Inca, leader of the Inca resistance: in 1537, on the plain below, his forces turned back a Spanish expedition by attacking from the high terraces and flooding the plain. He nevertheless withdrew the following year to Vilcabamba. Hiram Bingham passed through in 1911 on his way down the Urubamba in search of Machu Picchu.

Getting there

Ollantaytambo lies about 72 km northwest of Cusco by road, in the province of Urubamba; Ollantaytambo station is on the railway from Cusco to Machu Picchu. The nearest airport is Alejandro Velasco Astete International Airport in Cusco (CUZ), about 47 km away in a straight line.