The Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu ("the four parts together") in Quechua, was the largest state in the pre-Columbian Americas: between 1438 and 1533 it spread along the Andes from the southern edge of Colombia to central Chile, covering close to 2,000,000 km² of what are now Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Colombia. It was ruled from Cusco, high in the Peruvian Andes, divided into four quarters called suyus, and held together by a road network roughly 40,000 km long. Its farmers made steep mountainsides productive with terraces, and its builders left sites such as Sacsayhuamán and Machu Picchu. The clearest way to understand its geography is to travel it, stop by stop.
Cusco, the Navel of Tawantinsuyu
Every journey in the empire started or ended in Cusco, at about 3,400 m (11,200 ft) in a valley of south-eastern Peru near the Huatanay and Urubamba rivers. Inca tradition credits Manco Cápac with founding the city in the 12th century as the capital of a small Kingdom of Cusco. The Quechua name is Qusqu, and the chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega called the city "the navel of the universe". The name itself is traced to an Aymara phrase, qusqu wanka, "rock of the owl", tied to the Ayar origin legend.
Cusco was the ritual centre of the empire as well as its capital. Lines of shrines called ceques radiated out from it, and its most important temple, the Coricancha (Quri Kancha, "golden temple"), was dedicated to the sun god Inti. Spanish settlers took most of the temple apart, and the Church and Convent of Santo Domingo, rebuilt after the earthquake of 1650, still stands on its fitted stone walls. The Spanish refounded the city on 23 March 1534, mostly on top of Inca foundations. UNESCO listed the City of Cusco as a World Heritage Site in 1983, and its 2017 population was 428,450.
Chinchaysuyu, Antisuyu, Kuntisuyu and Qullasuyu
The emperor Pachacuti reorganised the kingdom around 1460 into four provinces whose corners met in Cusco. When they were created they were roughly equal in size. They changed shape as conquest pushed the borders north and south along the Andes.
- Chinchaysuyu (north-west) was the most populous quarter. It took in the former Chimú kingdom on the north coast of Peru and most of the northern Andes, eventually reaching through Ecuador into Colombia.
- Antisuyu (north-east) ran down the eastern slopes towards the Amazon forest. Its name is thought to be the root of the word "Andes".
- Kuntisuyu (south-west) was the smallest, stretching along the southern coast of Peru and up into the highlands towards Cusco.
- Qullasuyu (south-east) was the largest by area. Named after the Aymara-speaking Qulla people, it covered the Bolivian Altiplano and the southern Andes into what are now Argentina and Chile.
The quarters held many peoples and languages. Quechua was the language of administration, Aymara dominated the Altiplano, Puquina was spoken on the south coast and Mochica on the north coast around Chan Chan. Most estimates of the empire's population fall between 6 and 14 million, though the full range proposed runs from 4 to 37 million. The census records kept on knotted cords (quipus) can no longer be read.
Walking the Qhapaq Ñan
From Cusco four roads left in the four directions of the suyus. Together with their branches they formed the Qhapaq Ñan, the "royal road", which the Inca built and extended without wheeled transport or iron tools. Its total length is uncertain. The most common figure is about 40,000 km, but travellers and scholars have proposed anything from 23,000 km to 60,000 km. The best-documented single route is the mountain trunk road through Quito, Tumebamba, Huánuco, Cusco, Chucuito and Paria to the Mendoza River, which the archaeologist John Hyslop measured at 5,658 km.
There were two main north–south roads. The inland road ran high across the puna grassland, often above 4,000 m, and a ritual road climbed all the way to the 5,949 m summit of Mount Chañi. The western road started near Tumbes on today's Peru–Ecuador border and followed the coastal plains, keeping to the foothills where the coast became desert. The modern Pan-American Highway follows much of its line. The northern road from Cusco to Quito was regarded as the royal road itself, 3 to 16 m wide in places, and linked administrative centres such as Vilcashuamán, Huánuco Pampa, Cajamarca, Ingapirca and Tomebamba.
Travel was on foot, with llama caravans carrying goods. Relay runners called chasquis passed messages and quipus between small stations, and lodging houses called tambos stood about a day's walk apart, with storehouses (qullqas) for food, cloth and weapons. Labour for building and repair came from the mit'a, a work obligation owed to the state. Grass-rope bridges crossed the gorges. One survives at Queshuachaca over the Apurímac River, where local communities rebuild it every June. In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the Qhapaq Ñan as a World Heritage Site shared by Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.
Terraces at Moray and the Vertical Archipelago
The empire fed itself by farming every altitude band of the Andes. Communities held fields on the warm valley floors, on the slopes and in the high puna, and exchanged their produce. The anthropologist John Murra called this pattern the "vertical archipelago". Potatoes were freeze-dried in the cold highland nights into chuño, which could be stored for long periods, and herds of llamas and alpacas were kept on the high grasslands.
Terraces (andenes) made the slopes usable. At Moray, about 50 km north-west of Cusco on a plateau at around 3,500 m, the Inca shaped a set of circular depressions into stepped rings, the largest about 30 m deep. Cold air settles to the bottom, so the temperature can differ by as much as 15 °C between top and floor, and many researchers think the site was used to test crops under different conditions. Engineering studies of Machu Picchu's terraces in the 1990s showed how they were built in layers: large stones at the bottom, then gravel, then sand mixed with gravel, then topsoil carried up from the valley floor. The layers drained the heavy rain away and kept the slopes from sliding.
Sacsayhuamán and Machu Picchu
The walls above Cusco
On a hill on the northern edge of Cusco, at 3,701 m, stands Sacsayhuamán. Pottery shows people lived on the hilltop from about 900 CE, but the great walls are attributed to Pachacuti and his successors Topa Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Capac. Its best-known feature is a plaza lined by three huge terrace walls. The longest runs for about 400 m, and they are around 6 m tall. Estimates for the largest limestone block range from 128 to almost 200 tonnes. The stones are cut to fit so closely that in many places a sheet of paper will not slip between them, and the inward lean of the walls has helped them survive Cusco's earthquakes. Writing in 1553, Pedro Cieza de León said 20,000 workers were assigned to the project, with 4,000 quarrying stone and 6,000 hauling it with leather and fibre cables.
The estate on the Urubamba
About 80 km north-west of Cusco, on a ridge at 2,430 m (7,970 ft) above the gorge of the Urubamba River, lies Machu Picchu. It is generally thought to have been a royal estate of Pachacuti. A 2021 study of 26 radiocarbon dates from human remains places its occupation between about 1420 and 1530, slightly earlier than the traditional date of around 1450. Its Temple of the Sun, Temple of the Three Windows and Intihuatana stone show the same fine dry-stone masonry as Cusco. The Peruvian explorer Agustín Lizárraga reached it in 1902, and the American historian Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention in 1911. It became a UNESCO site in 1983.
Lake Titicaca and the Inca Origin Story
The empire's sacred geography reached south-east to Lake Titicaca, on today's Peru–Bolivia border at 3,812 m. Long before the Inca, the Tiwanaku state (about 300–1100 CE) had flourished on its shores, and the fitted, mortarless stonework the Inca later used had first been built on a large scale in this basin. In the version of the Inca origin story recorded by Garcilaso de la Vega, the Sun sent Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo up from the depths of the lake with a golden staff. They walked north until the staff sank into the ground at Mount Huanacaure, above the valley where Cusco was founded. A second tradition has the Ayar siblings emerging from caves at Tambo Tocco. The Inca believed the sun god himself was born on Isla del Sol, in the Bolivian part of the lake, which today has more than 80 ruins, most from the 15th century.
From Pachacuti in 1438 to Cajamarca in 1533
The Inca began as a small pastoral people around Cusco and spread into the Sacred Valley through wars, marriages and alliances. In 1438 the ninth ruler, Pachacuti, defeated the Chanka and began the expansion. His son Topa Inca Yupanqui campaigned north from 1463, ruled after 1471 and conquered the Chimú kingdom, the Inca's only serious rival on the coast. Huayna Capac added more territory in Ecuador. At its greatest extent the empire reached the south-western tip of Colombia in the north and the area of the Maule River in central Chile in the south.
It fell fast. Epidemic disease spread from Central America, possibly killing Huayna Capac in the 1520s, and a civil war between his sons Huáscar and Atahualpa followed. On 16 November 1532 Francisco Pizarro's small force seized Atahualpa in the plaza of Cajamarca and killed thousands of his unarmed attendants. The Spanish collected a ransom of gold and silver and then executed him on 26 July 1533. Manco Inca rose against the Spanish in 1536 and then withdrew to Vilcabamba, where the Neo-Inca State held out until its last ruler, Túpac Amaru, was captured and executed in 1572. For more on the landscapes this journey crosses, see our guides to the Andes mountains, Lake Titicaca and the World Heritage city of Cusco.