Plaza de Armas de Ollantaytambo

This guide to the Plaza de Armas in Ollantaytambo, in Cusco, starts nine miles away at a block of rose-colored stone still half cut from a mountainside, one of dozens of so-called tired stones abandoned along the old quarry road to the hilltop temple above town. You'll hear how Inca quarrymen split rock with swollen wooden wedges and crews hauled multi-ton blocks toward the unfinished Sun Temple, and how this square once served as the Inca town's entrance, ringed by walled kancha compounds built for Pachacuti's household staff and worked by yanakuna bound to the emperor. Stand on the cobblestones and picture the square as a working gateway, long before it became today's market.