Dynastic History | Cusco Cathedral — The Council Bought the Palace Ground, Then Sent for the Fortress Stone

On 15 August 1654 the first mass was said in the cathedral on the north-east side of Cusco's main square. The ground under it had been the Kiswarkancha, the compound associated with Wiraqucha Inka, on the plaza the court of Tawantinsuyu called Haukaypata: the ceremonial centre of the capital, which is why the site was chosen. The city council resolved to buy the land in 1552 at the bishop's urging. Work was under way by 1560 and passed through several named directors of works before Miguel Gutiérrez Sencio took charge in 1615.

The building material carries the rest of the argument. Red andesite blocks were carted down from Saqsaywaman, the terraced complex above the city, whose dressed masonry was being dismantled for exactly this purpose. The quarrying and the hauling were done by Indigenous labourers under colonial labour drafts, in a city where the obligation to supply that labour had changed hands rather than ended.

The earthquake of 1650 brought down the ribbed vault and little else. Definitive consecration came in 1668, fourteen years after the first mass and more than a century after the council's resolution. The image of the Señor de los Temblores, carried through Cusco in Holy Week, is venerated inside.

The construction dates here follow Víctor Angles Vargas's documentary history of the building; other accounts put the groundbreaking a year earlier, in 1559. The cathedral is open to visitors on a ticket shared with the city's other colonial churches.

📸 Cover: The cathedral seen from the arcades of the Plaza de Armas, Miguel Francisco Rueda Ñañez, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons