Dynastic History | Qorikancha and Santo Domingo — The Convent Came Apart, the Wall Did Not

On 21 May 1950 an earthquake shook Cusco, and the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo came apart above a wall that did not move. Tower arches dropped, the apse cracked, the cloister arcade went out of true. The coursed andesite beneath it — the enclosure the court of Tawantinsuyu called Qorikancha, the golden precinct, in the capital it called Qusqu — kept its lines, as it had through the earthquake of 1650, when the repairs went to the colonial superstructure and the Inca masonry needed none.

The wall was there first, and the convent was put on it deliberately. Qorikancha was the state's principal temple enclosure, its ashlar cut and set under the mit'a, the rotating labour obligation the capital assessed on the provinces it administered. In 1533 the gold sheathing was stripped from it to make up the ransom demanded for the sapa inca Atawallpa, then held at Cajamarca. Every surviving account of that stripping was written by men who took a share of the metal, and the weights they record are their accounting, not a measurement. Within a few years the Dominican order held the ground and raised its church directly on the Inca courses, using them as footing, with the same population carrying the stone under Spanish labour drafts.

Restoration after 1950 ran a quarter of a century; the architect Óscar Ladrón de Guevara's principal interventions were completed in 1976. It is still a working convent, ticketed, with the curved outer wall visible from Avenida El Sol.

📸 Cover: The convent of Santo Domingo standing on the Inca terrace walls of Qorikancha, Brian Jeffery Beggerly, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons