Korikancha and Santo Domingo, Cuzco

1450-1675

Name(s) currently unknown

Cuzco, PER

After the Spanish conquered Cuzco, the imperial capital of the Inka, Dominican friars built an imposing church and monastery over the most sacred temple in the town, the Korikancha.

The name Korikancha means “Golden Enclosure” in Quechua and eyewitnesses in the 16th century described a wide band of gold affixed to the top of the Inka building. After the conquest, the Dominicans built the apse wall of their church over the curving Inka foundation wall beneath, using the pre-Hispanic masonry as support. The Inka foundations part of the building was made of stones so carefully cut and assembled that the wall needed no mortar. Today, they remain tightly knitted together: a thin plastic credit card would not fit between them. Like the original compound of Korikancha, the Dominican monastery extends well beyond the limits of this photograph.

Inka rulers of Cuzco built the Korikancha in the 15th century to hold holy relics and house religious festivals. During the conquest, the building was despoiled, stripped of its treasures and gold ornament. After Spanish conquistodors and the Catholic Church toppled the Inka, the Dominicans took over the site. They partially razed the Korikancha, but reused much of the foundation and some of Korikancha’s interior walls in the Dominican church and convent complex.

Inka stone working is a marvel of engineering, with high-status architecture displaying walls of smooth ashlar faces. The sides of the stones are slightly concave or convex, each individually fitting into the stones around it. Such masonry is resistant to the earthquakes that have rocked Cuzco through the centuries. Thus, the Inka walls of Cuzco seem untouched by time. In contrast, the colonial church above, made of standard cut stone joined by mortar, has been unsettled by earthquakes and eroded by weather over the centuries.

Throughout the colonial period, the Inka foundations of the building were covered by other structures. But an earthquake in the 1950s, which nearly leveled Cuzco, revealed these walls. Archeologists uncovered more Inka walls, reused within the Dominican complex. Today, what is left of the original Inka building is exposed within the monastery, visible to visitors.

A site of supreme historical and ritual importance to the Inka, Korikancha was at once a religious and political building, as was the Dominican monastery that followed it. For both Spaniards and Inka, such architectural superimposition was a ready reminder of the new social and political hierarchy. And while each group must have attributed its own meanings to this juxtaposition, works such as this, which appropriate and reinterpret pre-conquest sites and concepts, made manifest the political force of visual culture in Spanish America.

Carolyn S. Dean

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