Cuzco: City Tour

Last day of class with this week’s teachers: just as Spain Spanish was growing on me we are thrust into another professor’s class!  Nonetheless this day was fun as we went to a café for Tyler’s birthday and I had some great Black Forest Cake.

After school was out a group of us found the best pizza in Cuzco at a homemade, wood-oven baked pizzeria.  We had the traditional Margharita pizzas, Hawaiian for the meat eaters and the so-so Palta (Avocado) Pizza.  A good try but I don’t think the mild avocado does much with equally mild and similar textured cheese.

Next was our walking tour of Cuzco.  We started out at a series of Cathedrals, it was a bit unclear but evidently the Iglesias go by a few different names including Church of the Sacred Family and Jesus, Joseph and Mary Church.  Today the first cathedral is just for churches but the other two are still open for mass in the mornings from 6-8am an adaption from the times of the Shining Path when tens of thousands were murdered.

All 3 of the churches we went in were absolutely beautiful.  Some had ornate altars covered in gold or silver while others were just intrinsically carved cedar.  In some of the paintings Mary and Jesus were darker skinned and resembled the indigenous Peruvians while in the painting of the Last Supper Judas was the dark skinned person at the table filled with papas, frutas and a larger rodent commonly eaten in Perú.

There was also a sculpture of El Señor de los Milagras, the black Jesus first worshiped in the Afro-Peruvian neighborhoods in Lima.  The choir room we saw was very similar to the San Francisco Church we saw in Lima but with native women and potatoes represented in some of the carvings.

The churches were first built in 1538 out of mud bricks but later rebuilt with granite in 1729.  With the frequency of earthquakes the planned 3^rd floor was scrapped but the 56 arches of one church still remain. 

Next we traveled to Qorikancha or the Temple of the Rainbow, an Incan temple made in the typical Incan stone-on-stone manner.  The craftsmanship was absolutely amazing and the trapezoidal windows, niches and doorways are evidently a characteristic of Incan culture.  One of the stones we saw had 16 angles cut into it to make the outer wall, doorway and inner wall of one building.  The few rooms we saw demonstrated the Incan characteristics of simplicity, singularity and symmetry.  Originally the rooms were covered with either adobe or gold (differing information) and a thatch roof.

Dominican building surrounding the Temple of the Sun

Trapezoidal windows

The Incans combated their seismic location by putting notches in the granite or basalt (again differing information) stones that they constructed walls from.  By fitting the stones together they were able to move but not fall in the earthquakes, a quality not replicated by the Dominicans whose stone and mortar walls fell in one quake.

We then travelled up the mountainside to see Sacsayhuaman (pronounced similar to Sexy Woman), another Incan construction overlooking the present day city of Cuzco.  Four of us took a detour to the very top where we got a beautiful view of the city including our much-frequented Plaza de Armas in the sunset. 

Lessons Learned:

1.  Cedar was used for many of the altars and pews in the churches, it is native to Peru but not near Cuzco, instead it is found in the selva, or jungle.
2. The Spanish often built churches, government buildings on top of important sites within the cultures they conquered.  The cathedrals are no exception and were build on the Wiracocha Palace site.
3.  Nextel evidently is quite popular in Peru, according to my conversation with a taxi driver.  He did say that pre-paid is much more common than plans however.