Qorikancha
Inca sun temple whose gold-plated walls were plundered, its foundations now underpinning a colonial church.
This guide to Qorikancha in Cusco opens in November 1533, with Pizarro's soldiers prying gold sheets off a temple wall built so precisely that a knife blade cannot slip between its stones. It traces the site back to Pachacutec's Golden Enclosure, dedicated to the sun god Inti and ringed by a garden where corn, llamas and human figures stood cast in gold and silver rather than grown from soil. It follows that gold into the ransom room filled for the captured emperor Atahualpa, and into Juan Pizarro's claim on the site before Dominican friars built their church over what was left. Stand where the curved Inca stone base meets the whitewashed wall above it.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.