Cusco & the Sacred Valley

Cusco was the navel of the Inca world — Qosqo, in Quechua — and it still is: the capital Pachacútec rebuilt in the fifteenth century in the shape of a puma, with the fortress of Sacsayhuamán for a head and the meeting of two rivers for a tail, at 3,399 metres in a bowl of the Andes. The Spaniards raised their churches on the Inca walls rather than through them, so the city is a palimpsest you can touch: the Qorikancha's golden temple under a Dominican convent, a colonial street on twelve-angled stones fitted without mortar, a cathedral on the plaza where the empire once counted its provinces.

The traveller arrives slowly — the altitude is a fact before it is a view — and walks the Plaza de Armas and Hatun Rumiyoc's famous stone; climbs to San Blas, the artisan hill of narrow lanes; sits in the Qorikancha to read the two cities in one wall; takes the afternoon to Sacsayhuamán's zigzag ramparts; and gives the days that follow to the Sacred Valley — Pisac's market and terraces, Chinchero's weavers, Moray's circles, Maras's salt pans, Ollantaytambo's living Inca town — before the train down the Urubamba to Machu Picchu, which deserves its own morning and its own silence.

The Guide's practical counsel: take the first day easy — coca or muña tea, water, a light lunch, no hills — and let the body catch up with the map; buy the Boleto Turístico for the sites around the city and the valley; book Machu Picchu and its trains weeks ahead, months in the dry season; the Inca Trail closes every February and fills the rest of the year; nights are cold at any season and heating is rare; and Inti Raymi, on the twenty-fourth of June, fills the city entirely, gloriously, and expensively.