Cusco — Qusqu in Quechua — was founded, according to Inca oral tradition, by the legendary first Inca ruler Manco Cápac, and grew from a regional settlement into the capital of the largest empire in pre-Columbian America under a line of expansionist rulers starting in the 15th century. At its peak under Pachacuti, who rebuilt the city in the mid-15th century, the Inca Empire spanned territory across 12 modern countries, run through a genuinely sophisticated road system, agricultural terracing, and a record-keeping system using knotted strings called quipu.
The Spanish arrived in 1532 under Francisco Pizarro at a moment of internal Inca civil war following a succession crisis, and the conquest moved with a speed that even surprised the Spanish themselves. Capturing and executing the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1533 effectively decapitated the empire’s central authority overnight. Cusco fell that same year, and the systematic dismantling and repurposing of Inca religious sites began almost immediately — the Coricancha, the most sacred Inca temple, its walls once lined with gold, became a Dominican convent.
What’s genuinely striking is how much physical evidence of Inca construction survives in the modern city — far more than you’d expect from a conquered capital. The precision-cut Inca stonework proved so stable that Spanish builders simply built straight on top of it, which means a lot of colonial buildings today sit directly on Inca masonry that’s outlasted everything constructed above it.
A devastating 1950 earthquake, terrible in human terms, inadvertently exposed more Inca stonework hidden beneath colonial buildings for 400 years — adding genuinely new material to the archaeological record of the pre-colonial city.