Sunday 22 February 2015

Tipon, Pikilliacta and Rumicolca.


The Inca were brilliant engineers who strove to integrate their architecture with its natural surroundings. TIPON, a 500-acre site built around a spring near Cusco, has been called their masterpiece of water management. 
The intricate baths and irrigation channels still function five centuries after the Spanish conquest.
Because the waterworks were constructed as part of a country estate for Inca nobility, Tipon has beautiful stone structures. 
The terraces were for agriculture. The baths served a religious purpose and on the site is an area devoted to astrological investigations. It is also wonderfully peaceful here.

                                                              PIKILLIACTA

I loved this place. It extends over a huge area and was built by the Huari culture around 800 AD, before the rise of the Incas.
                                     It has unique, geometrically designed terraces.
There are a group of bulky two-storey constructions: apparently these were entered by ladders reaching up to doorways set well off the ground in the first storey – very unusual in ancient Peru. They possibly were barrack-like quarters.
               Many of the walls are built of small cut stones joined with mud mortar.
 When the Incas arrived early in the fifteenth century they modified the site to suit their own purposes, possibly even building the aqueduct that once connected Pikillacta with the ruined gateway of                                                 RUMICOLCA

This massive defensive passage was also initially constructed by the Huari people and served as a southern entrance to – and frontier of – their empire.
The coolest part of this place is the obvious Inca additions. It was blowing a gale and raining on and off ......
The Incas improved on the rather crude Huari stonework of the original gateway, using regular blocks of polished andesite from a local quarry. It rises about 12 meters.
It became an Inca checkpoint, regulating the flow of people and goods into the Cusco Valley: no one was permitted to enter or leave the valley via Rumicolca between sunset and sunrise. This trip was fabulous and I really enjoyed it.

1 comment:

  1. Your blog makes me want to visit Peru again. How steep are the climbs to get into these places?

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