Monumento Inca Pachacutec

This guide to the Monumento Inca Pachacutec in Cusco opens with a surprising number: the bronze giant overlooking this roundabout is not one cast piece but eleven hundred separate sections, welded together by sculptor Fausto Espinoza Farfan's workshop in 1991. You'll hear why the city wanted a monument to Pachacutec, the ninth Inca credited with turning a small highland kingdom into an empire, and how twenty tons of silicon bronze were poured and fitted by hand until the seams disappeared. Below the statue, a stone tower carries a small museum, built from blocks hauled from four different quarries using the same interlocking technique Inca masons used centuries earlier.