Dynastic History | Saqsaywaman — Cieza Counted the Shifts, Garcilaso Watched the Carts

Pedro Cieza de León, writing in 1553, set down how the terraces above Qusqu were raised. The state called up twenty thousand men from the provinces, in rotation so that no community carried the obligation continuously, and put four thousand of them to quarrying, six thousand to hauling stone on leather cables, the rest to foundations and timber, under overseers it appointed. Those are his figures and they should be read as his: a Spanish soldier's account of a system he never saw running, taken down from people who remembered it. The obligation behind the numbers is not in doubt — labour owed to the capital, assessed on communities by the administration that ran Tawantinsuyu.

Half a century later Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Qusqu in 1539 to an Inca noblewoman and a Spanish captain, published in Lisbon a description of the same walls and of what was being done to them. The Spanish of Cusco, he wrote, "to save themselves the expense, effort and delay with which the Indians worked the stone", had "pulled down all the smooth masonry in the walls" — his words, and his period's vocabulary. The dressed blocks went into the houses and churches of the colonial city. What survived is what was too heavy to move: three tiers of zigzag rampart, the largest blocks estimated at well over a hundred tonnes.

The site is a national archaeological park. Since 1944 the Inti Raymi pageant, scripted by Faustino Espinoza Navarro out of Garcilaso's chronicle, has been staged on the ground below these walls every 24 June.

📸 Cover: The zigzag ramparts at Saqsaywaman, February 2026, Caminando Cusco, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons