Ollantaytambo

A royal estate was not a palace with a garden. When Pachacuti — the ruler who turned a small hill kingdom around Cusco into the largest empire the Americas had seen — took Ollantaytambo in the mid-1400s, he took the whole valley with it. The land became his household’s property, farmed by yanakuna, retainers bound to the emperor for life. They cut the slopes into terraces of dressed stone and sank a long alley of them below ground level south of the town, whose walls trap the day’s heat and give it back at night — warm enough, at nearly 2,800 metres, to grow lowland crops.

Eighty-odd years later the estate became a fortress. The Spanish had crowned Manco Inca as a puppet ruler, then robbed, insulted and finally imprisoned him; he rebelled in 1536 and fell back on Ollantaytambo. In January 1537 Hernando Pizarro rode up the valley with a hundred Spaniards and thousands of native allies. The Incas fought from the high terraces and let the Urubamba out across the flat ground until the cavalry was floundering, and the Spaniards slipped away after dark. It is the one clear Inca victory of the conquest — and it settled nothing: Manco left for the forests of Vilcabamba the next year.

Pachacuti’s Temple of the Sun was never finished. Six slabs of pink rhyolite stand fitted edge to edge with thin stone spacers, quarried at Cachiqata five kilometres away across the river and dragged up ramps; half-hauled blocks still lie along the route, and people here call them piedras cansadas, tired stones. But nobody ever moved out. Water channels chatter down the cobbled lanes between Inca walls, and the houses are among the oldest continuously inhabited in South America. Since the railway opened in 1931 the town has had a second job: PeruRail and Inca Rail run down the Urubamba gorge to Aguas Calientes in about an hour and a half, and because departures from the Cusco side are seasonal and often suspended, nearly everyone boards here. Before dawn the platform fills with rucksacks.