Urubamba

This guide to Urubamba, near Cusco, starts beneath the cornfields north of town, where the emperor Huayna Capac's engineers rerouted the Urubamba River itself to build his country palace around the turn of the sixteenth century. You'll hear about the scale of the project, a workforce Spanish chroniclers put as high as one hundred fifty thousand men draining swampland and raising a walled compound, and why the builders skipped the fitted stonework famous at nearby Ollantaytambo in favor of a faster adobe-over-stone shortcut. The guide follows what the palace was for and what became of the estate after Huayna Capac's death. Listen for how the guide reads the difference in the stone itself, walking the surviving wall.