Tipón Archaeological Park

This guide to Tipon, outside Cusco, opens with an engineering riddle: how do you make water fall fifteen feet in a single drop, without splashing anywhere it should not. It follows the Inca ruler Wiracocha, who is said to have ordered this valley built in the early fourteen hundreds as a retreat for his aging father, and the engineers who turned it into more than a farm, a stage where groundwater rises into a stone basin and splits into three separate canals. Along the way it walks the ceremonial baths and terraces that doubled this royal estate as both testing ground and pleasure garden.