Rumicolca

This guide to Rumicolca outside Cusco examines a wall built twice: first by the Wari more than a thousand years ago as an aqueduct toward Pikillacta, then dressed over by Inca masons whose joints were cut so tight that no blade could pass between the blocks. Once the Inca absorbed the valley, the wall became a checkpoint gate, the single passage every trader and llama train had to funnel through on the road to Collasuyu. Goods moving south toward Collasuyu or north into the Cusco valley were checked and taxed at exactly this stone corridor, with no way around it.