While millions come to Peru’s Andean highlands for the Inca ruins and festivals, there are other stories here. Time your visit for the solstice to explore an ancient region where even the streets are shaped by the heavens

Words & Photgraphs Mark Stratton

“Slow down,” I chided myself, sucking in the rarefied Cusco air and hurrying over the cobblestones of Peru’s Quechua-language capital. I needed to be on Calle Siete
Culebras (Seven Snakes Street) at 7.05am to witness the southern hemisphere’s winter solstice on 21 June, an eternal timestamp on Peru’s pre-Columbian architecture. Thankfully, I had just about made it.

The street, both narrow and steep, still glistened from the earlier rain and the solstice sunbeam arrowed in on a south-west course with unerring timing, bathing me in light. By design, the sun’s rays filter through Cusco’s central plaza, the beating heart of the city, where they cut across the axis formed during the summer solstice. Nothing here is by accident.

I’d come to Peru’s Andes not to obsess about Machu Picchu, the citadel associated with the Inca whose 2 million-plus visitors a year are taking a toll on its ruins, but to discover the cosmological secrets behind the region’s fanciful archaeological heritage. Square in my gaze were the megaliths of pre-Inca civilisations, which appeared to my uneducated eye to be uncannily extraterrestrial in appearance. My astral guide was Andres Adasme, a 50-year-old Chilean archaeoastronomer and a resident of the Andes for two decades. He promised that during our seven days together he would “squeeze knowledge from ancient stones” as we headed off the tourist routes to gain a new perspective on just how ingenious and mathematical these ancient cultures were.

However, even wannabe archaeoastronomers need to breath. After travelling from Lima (161m) to Cusco (3,400m), I descended into the lower-altitude Sacred Valley to acclimatise. Down here, between Pisac and Ollantaytambo, the flat-bottomed farmland hid a breadbasket of maize and hundreds of potato varieties. But this was also dry season, so the land was coloured a russet-brown and the stubble of cut maize resembled brushed mohair.

I reoxygenated in a stone-built casita at the transcendentally calm Hotel Sol y Luna. Each morning, I sank into my bath and watched gossamer-green hummingbirds levitate around flower-filled gardens. At night, the Milky Way sparkled magnificently overhead.

Having acclimatised, I returned to Qusqu (in Quechuan), better known as Cusco – a name the invading conquistadors could more easily wrap their tongues around – to meet Andres. Fate had surely directed him towards archaeoastronomy, which looks at how past civilisations used the sun and the stars to design their temples and guide their lives. His ex-wife was born on the summer solstice, while their daughter, named after the constellation Lyra, arrived on the winter solstice. During our time together, his energetic, inquisitive mind constantly challenged an Inca architectural orthodoxy that understates the prowess of earlier civilisations, and being in his company was a little like living inside a Dan Brown novel.

Older than you think

On our first morning together, Andres and I stuck to the ancient stone streets of Cusco, a town I’d consistently read was founded by the Inca – a heritage it theatrically plays up to. Quechua women cuddling baby alpacas traded photographs for cash while street sellers sold knitted toy llamas and scarves with bright motifs. But Andres is convinced that Cusco’s lineage is far, far older than the Inca.

We headed to the main plaza, which was filled with musicians and dancers warming up for the forthcoming Inti Raymi festival of the sun. Here we saw a mid-17th-century basilica sat above a destroyed huaca (temple) that was once dedicated to the Andean creator god Viracocha. This name is also given to an ancient civilisation from around Lake Titicaca, Andres told me, who spread north into the Andes and likely founded Cusco long before the Inca.

We followed a processional route through the city from north-east to south-west, aligned with the winter solstice line (also known as the secondary axis). Six huacas once existed along this line, I was told, all subsequently demolished for churches. The cathedral plaza also intersects with the south-east/north-west summer solstice axis (the primary), thus quartering the city into the four corners of the Inca Empire.

“Six huacas once existed along this solstice line; they were all demolished for churches”

By inputting what he calls his ‘gears’ – the solstices, the Milky Way’s alignment and the position of the Southern Cross – into a computer programme (Stellarium), Andres has produced an estimate that Cusco may be as much as 12,000 years old.

To emphasise the city’s palimpsest origins, we walked along the summer solstice axis towards a temple called Qoricancha, which was said to have once been covered in gold. Along the way we passed the best verified Inca stonework in the city, on Calle Intik’ijllu, where cushion-sized pink andesite blocks attested to the exquisite workmanship of the period. Yet it was a far cry from what we found on Calle Inka Roqa, where the walls are fashioned from huge green-diorite megaliths with curved joints. “This is older; it’s nothing like Inca design,” Andres explained.

When viewed from above, historic Cusco’s streets are said to be configured like a puma with a serpent along its back. The puma’s heart has been calculated to be where the solstices cross and where the Viracocha temple once stood. Showing me the graphics of a model he had made of the puma’s form, Andres explained that the design transcended the three ‘pachas’ (worlds): Kay Pacha, the living realm symbolised by the puma and Earth goddess Pachamama; Uku Pacha, the underworld guarded by the serpent, a keeper of knowledge; and Hanan Pacha, the cosmological world above. He believes the latter’s symbol, the condor, is represented by a stargazing tower on Cusco’s main plaza that is long since destroyed. The condor is, however, also associated with a remarkable hillside construction above Cusco called Sacsayhuamán. It’s such a sophisticated cosmological timepiece that it makes Stonehenge look like children’s Lego.

Hidden secrets

Naturally, our next stop was Sacsayhuamán. As we entered the site, Andres sighed at a sign reading: ‘Important cultural and ideological legacy of the Inka (sic) culture.’ Ducking through a natural cave, we arrived at a circular plaza, instantly sending several lapwings looping through the air.

The whole complex, Andres told me, was used as a colossal astronomical observatory. The plaza once held water that was used as a mirror to trace the movement of the sun and the Milky Way by reflection.

Beyond the site lay a hillside terraced by huge stone megalithic blocks, aligned geometrically in a zigzagging fashion. Reaching 5m high and weighing over 100 tonnes, their joints were cigarette-paper thin. Above them were once three towers built for sky observation. These megaliths were from an unknown and sophisticated civilisation, Andres explained.

“But why so massive?” I wondered.

“To make a lasting impression?” he shrugged. How they were used astronomically remains a mystery. “The knowledge was meant for a select few: the Amauta, or wise ones. But it was lost forever when they fled the Spanish, who had no idea how sophisticated Andean society was.”

Casting shadows

Further cosmological wonders awaited me in the week that I spent in the Sacred Valley during the lead up to the winter solstice. We soared higher into the Andes, closer to the mountain deities known as Apu. At Pisac, the mountainside fell away for several kilometres and was replaced by colossal terraces. The cliffside burial caves here attract coachloads of visitors, while up on the summit, a series of stone buildings marked with niches ascend to a sheer precipice.
As with everywhere we visited, Andres had a theory: “I believe the mummified dead were brought here so their souls could connect with Hanan Pacha,” he told me.

Escaping the crowds, we hiked down an old pathway following the mountain’s folds for three knee-jarring hours to an intiwatana (sundial), a word whose rather poetic translation from Quechua means to ‘tie up the sun’. On a mountain saddle, I gazed over the square, roofless stone buildings surrounding the circular tower. Machu Picchu’s intiwatana is off-limits due to the impact of its crowds; here I could freely gaze on the tabular rock altar, its gnomon facing skywards in order to cast the sun’s shadows.

Naturally, Andres had another idea as to its use. He showed me shoebox-sized niches running along the sundial’s steps. “I think these were for candles, which you’d only need at night, so this was also likely an observatory,” he said.

Later, as we were drinking local craft beer in a cerveceria, I asked him why it was so important for these past Andean civilisations to have acquired such cosmological knowledge. It had many uses, he explained, and chief among them was farming.

“The Pleiades constellation is seen near the Southern Cross before sunrise. At winter solstice, if the constellation seems blurred, then it means that more humidity is rising in the Amazon and rain is coming, so they would plant their crops. If clear, it suggests dryness ahead, so they would delay planting.”

A guiding star

The next morning, my temples pounded as we crossed the 4,400m-high pass into the Lares Valley. The road switchbacked via the glaciated peak of Sahuasiray (5,818m) and then descended into Choquecancha, a village with a centuries-old whitewashed Spanish church on the verge of collapsing.

Vaqueros (cowboys) led horses laden with sacks of harvested maize clip-clopping across the plaza’s cobbles. Few visitors make it here. The plaza, Andres said, was another reflective pool for observing the Milky Way and the solstices. In its corner was once a suntur-huasi, a ‘condor tower’, to observe and connect with Hanan Pacha.

“It only collapsed 15 years ago,” said Maribel Tito, a villager with whom we ate a lunch of lentils and rice. “It was 10m high and had one window facing west, towards the Milky Way. Farmers still go into the mountains here to predict next season’s weather by looking at the stars, and we know our maize is ripe when the choclopocochi (black-and-white seedeater) calls. It flies here to eat our crop.”

By now, I had sensed that I was immersed within a living Andean landscape that was little changed since the conquistadors arrived. The high-altitude moorland surrounding the remote Huacahuasi Lodge, where I spent the evening, was scattered with adobe and stone farmsteads guarding huge alpaca herds and tiny potato terraces.

“Farmers still go into the mountains to predict next season’s weather by looking at the stars”

More than one-third of Peruvians identify as Quechua. Up here, the women all wore bright knee-length skirts, lliclla woollen shawls pinned with clasps and wide-brimmed hats – some of which resembled extravagant fruit bowls. Locals also still observe ceremonies to thank Pachamama, especially in regard to their livestock. In Huilloc, I watched as a very reluctant sheep was daubed with chicha maize beer in the pattern of a crucifix, reflecting a bets-each-way syncretism of Catholicism and paganism still prevalent today.

That night in Huacahuasi Lodge, I experienced the awe that the Milky Way must have inspired in the Inca and those that came before them. Admittedly, stargazing while sat on a terrace in a Jacuzzi wasn’t in the ancient spirit of things, but just as the pre-Columbians had witnessed, I saw Scorpio shine and used the Southern Cross as my guide. I nearly spilt my coca tea into the bubbles when two shooting stars careened across the horizon.

Yet, for all the sparkle of the Milky Way, it was the forms created by its dark cloud constellations – voids, like Rorschach inkblots, given life by the people of the Andes – which were particularly auspicious. I pinpointed the twin stars of Alpha and Beta Centauri, said to be the eyes of a sacred black llama (its body a dark mass) drinking from the Urubamba River. Andean people say that it rains during summer because the celestial llama drank too much.

It was the farmer’s constellation, the Pleiades, that I really wanted to see. The next morning, just before 5am, Andres knocked on my door and we went outside to see its seven stars glinting north-east of Jupiter. It was clear. Perhaps a bad omen for my already-planted tomato plants back home.

A final surprise

A few days before winter solstice, we reached the fabulous Ollantaytambo, a popular jumping-off point for those taking the train to Machu Picchu. Away from the chaotic railway station, the quiet centre’s megalithic green-stone lanes are laid out in a geometric grid resembling a maize sheaf – one that holds many secrets.

Either side of the solstice (21 June) there is a window of around two days when the sunlight is projected at the same angle. With that window still open, we hiked along the River Urubamba and made our way to a terrace facing where the solstice sun would rise, theoretically, from behind Pinkuylluna mountain to direct a sunbeam towards us.

As we waited, Andres explained how this light would define one side of a hidden optical illusion: a three-dimensional pyramid called Pacaritambo (or Paqariq Tampu, meaning ‘Lodging of the Dawn’). It took a while to get my head around this. He explained that the walled one-dimensional farm fields below us were crossed by a lane shadowing the equinoctial line (the line of the equinox when the sun crosses the equator); this was engineered in such a way that a pyramid manifests itself in 3D as you gain altitude. The idea was almost unbelievable. What level of sophistication and knowledge could have engineered this?

“Nobody comes to see it; there’s virtually no literature about it. Yet it’s one of the world’s greatest phenomena,” said Andres. “I think it’s part of the oldest and biggest sundial in all the Americas: a magical alignment between the sun, the earth’s axis and architecture.”
However, the usually clear winter skies were freakishly cloudy and the solstice light was snuffed out. I had to console myself with the sight of the giant hummingbirds that emerged at dawn.

“The sunbeam defines one side of a hidden optical illusion: a 3D pyramid”

Yet this optical pyramid is only one part of Ollantaytambo’s celestial interconnectedness, which we then spent time exploring in depth. The solstice beam intersects a mountainside Sun Temple in town. Around that temple’s base are enigmatic green-diorite blocks with unfathomable grooves and notches; these stones were either waiting to be transported up to the Sun Temple or were cast down by Spanish philistines. Andres had seen this architectural masonry before, though, at an ancient temple in Tiwanaku, not far from Lake Titicaca. “A Polish scientist dated that architecture to 12,000 years old,” he said.

We climbed the Sun Temple’s terraced hillside to seek out six humungous rectangular pink granite slabs. Andres remarked that it was one side of an incomplete solar observatory. The 4m-tall blocks had been chiselled with strange protuberances that cast, he believed, a secret shadow language of the cosmos that only the Amauta could decipher. Just as it occurred to me that these slabs resembled the extra-terrestrial monolith in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, an excited Chinese visitor hurried over and said: “Can’t be human… must be aliens.”

The following day, we hiked up Pinkuylluna mountain, where the huge face of the god Tunupa Viracocha had been hewn – heavens knows how – from a cliff. He is bearded, just as ancient mythology recalled the Viracocha peoples’ appearance. We looked back from here towards the Sun Temple to see the terraces form the outline of the sacred black llama of the Milky Way. Its head is the Sun Temple, which receives the winter solstice sunbeam to create the llama’s illuminated eye.

By now, I just accepted the ancient Andeans’ cosmological brilliance, although sadly I never witnessed the solstice here. Perhaps Tunupa Viracocha was disgruntled. We’d clasped three coca leaves in a prayer-like cupping of our hands on the mountainside and blew, as tradition dictates, to beseech clear skies. But old stony face hadn’t listened.

No matter. At every place we’d visited during this inspiring week, each archaeological site had been energised by discussions with my brilliant friend Andres on cosmology, the extravagance of design, what protuberances meant, and with what earthly powers the people here had manhandled 100-tonne blocks up a mountainside.

I returned to Cusco to find the city had erupted into the kaleidoscopic Inca pageantry of Inti Raymi. The festival now takes place after the solstice (on 24 June), following a historic merging with the Catholic feast day of St John the Baptist, as the Church saw heresy in worshipping the sun. It is Disneyfied Andean eye-candy at its finest. But, as I’d discovered, there is another way to experience the solstice here. Just a few days earlier, I’d witnessed the sun inflame Calle Seven Snakes and metaphorically stood shoulder to shoulder with the cosmic designers of the past. I’d seen Cusco and the Sacred Valley in a completely different and wondrous light.