The Coricancha: Temple of the Sun in Cusco
The Coricancha (Quri Qancha, “Golden Enclosure”) was the principal temple of the Inca sun god, Inti, in the capital of the Inca Empire, and the religious center of the Sapa Inca and the imperial state. Located in the southeastern quadrant of the imperial city of Cusco, the complex combined a great courtyard, separate shrines to the sun, the moon, the stars, the creator god Viracocha, thunder, and the rainbow, together with a garden of golden plants, fountains fed by the Pumacurco aqueduct, and a chamber housing the mummified bodies of deceased rulers. The Spanish built the church and convent of Santo Domingo directly on top of the precinct after the conquest of 1533, and the Inca walls, in particular the curved polygonal wall of the Sun Temple, remain visible as the foundations of the colonial building.
Origins and pre-imperial phases
Excavations carried out in the early twentieth century by the Peruvian archaeologist Luis Valcárcel, and later expanded by the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco, established that the precinct had a long pre-imperial history. Beneath the polygonal masonry attributed to the imperial Inca, Valcárcel documented earlier walls of cyclopean and fieldstone construction associated with the Killke culture that occupied the Cusco basin between roughly 1100 and 1438 CE. A small oracle shrine known as the Suntur Wasi, dedicated to a sacred huaca of the region, may have stood on the site, and several chroniclers mention that a pre-imperial Sun Temple already existed before the reforms of the ninth Sapa Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, in the mid-fifteenth century.
The chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, drawing on the testimony of Inca nobles interrogated in the 1570s, recorded that Pachacuti rebuilt the Sun Temple after his military victory over the Chanka in 1438, in fulfillment of a vow made to Inti on the eve of battle. The new complex was designed as the religious counterpart to the fortress of Sacsayhuamán and to the rebuilt royal residences of the Hanan sector. The rebuilding was carried out by mit’a labor drawn from across the empire, and the finished walls, both flat and curved, were sheathed in gold plates weighing an estimated total of more than 1,500 kilograms.
Architecture and the famous curved wall
The Coricancha occupies an enclosed rectangular precinct of approximately 130 by 110 meters, oriented to the principal axis of imperial Cusco, roughly 30 degrees east of true north. The complex was entered from the Haucaypata plaza through a trapezoidal doorway in the western wall, and the principal Sun Temple stood against the southern wall of the precinct, with subsidiary shrines arrayed around a central courtyard paved with polished slabs of greenish andesite.
The walls are built in the imperial style of polygonal ashlar, with each stone cut to fit its neighbors so precisely that the joints are difficult to detect without close inspection. The most famous section is the curved wall of the Sun Temple, which runs for approximately 12 meters along the southeastern corner of the complex and turns through approximately 90 degrees in a continuous polygonal curve. The wall contains six of the most complex stones in the entire imperial corpus, including blocks with eight, nine, and ten exterior sides, and the curvature was achieved without the use of any mortar, plaster, or supporting structure. The wall has been the subject of detailed photogrammetric and architectural studies, including work by the Italian architect Enrico Cancian, which have established that the curve was laid out geometrically before the stones were cut.
The Sun Temple itself was a single large hall entered through a trapezoidal doorway, with a niche at the eastern end that once held a great golden disk representing the sun. A separate chamber, sometimes called the Hurin Sun Temple, opened onto the courtyard and was used during the southern solstice ceremonies, when the sun, in Inca cosmology, was considered to be entering the underworld. The shrines to Viracocha, the moon goddess Mama Killa, the Pleiades (Collca), thunder (Illapa), and the rainbow (Kuychi) occupied the eastern and northern sides of the precinct. The Hall of Serpents, with stones carved in the form of a double-headed serpent, and a small chamber dedicated to the mallquis, or mummified rulers, completed the complex.
The fountains and the Pumacurco aqueduct
The Coricancha was supplied with water from a sacred spring on the hillside of Pumacurco, on the slopes above Cusco, by a stone-lined aqueduct of the same name. The aqueduct was approximately 1.5 kilometers long and entered the complex from the north, terminating in a sequence of fountains, basins, and channels that distributed water through the precinct. The principal fountain, sometimes called the Inti-huatana, stood in the central courtyard and was the focus of daily offerings of llama fat, aqha (maize beer), and textiles. The system was dismantled after the Spanish conquest, and the surviving sections of the canal are now embedded in the walls of the colonial city.
The water from Pumacurco was considered sacred and was used in the rituals of the imperial cult, in particular in the initiation of the Sapa Inca and in the ceremonies associated with the June solstice, when the rising sun was said to drink from the principal fountain. Colonial chroniclers such as Bernabé Cobo and Garcilaso de la Vega described the channels, the gardens, and the fountains in detail, and their accounts have been confirmed in part by archaeological investigation.
The garden of gold
According to Garcilaso de la Vega and other sixteenth-century writers, the Coricancha contained a garden in which plants, animals, and even insects were reproduced in gold and silver, including maize, quinoa, potatoes, coca, llamas, jaguars, monkeys, foxes, condors, falcons, butterflies, and beetles. The garden was said to have been tended by the aqllakuna, the chosen women who lived in the Acllahuasi, the cloister that adjoined the precinct. The garden was stripped of its metal fittings by the Spanish in 1533, and the gold was sent to Spain, where a portion was used to pay the Welser banking house and the army of Francisco Pizarro.
Modern archaeologists and art historians have debated the precise form of the garden, with some scholars suggesting that the gold pieces were in fact individually crafted and placed in a real garden of living plants, and others arguing that they were smaller votive objects deposited in a sacred precinct. Whatever its exact form, the descriptions are consistent with the broader Inca practice of producing miniature representations of the natural world in precious metal for use in temples and shrines, a tradition that is closely associated with the Inca pantheon of the imperial period.