Hatunrumiyoc Street

1500-1700

Name(s) currently unknown

Cuzco, PER

This street, which runs near the main plaza in Cuzco, reveals the material transformation of an Andean city after the Spanish conquest.

The narrow street was originally the product of Inka city planners. The mortar-less stonework of the pre-Hispanic Inka is clearly visible at the base of the buildings that line it. The wall’s Inka masons recessed the edges of each stone, to create a swelling surface. The recessed joins yield a complex play of light and shadow, and this aesthetic may have been the intent of the masons. One famous Inka-carved stone has a face with twelve angles, the most of any in this wall. Post-conquest additions that rest atop Inka stonework have been covered in white plaster. The street reveals one way that pre-Hispanic foundations gave form and structure to the urban fabric of viceregal Cuzco.

The walls on the right side of the street were built when Cuzco was the capital of the Inka empire and formed part of a palace for a Sapa Inka. After the Spanish conquest, these and other structures were converted to serve as homes to the conquistadors or administrative buildings for viceregal officials. Here, a palace for the Marquis of Buenavista was built upon Inka foundation walls, and later served as a residence for the Archbishop of Cuzco.

When conquistadors and later Spanish settlers moved into Cuzco, they often built houses at the center of town atop indigenous foundation walls. The Inka masons who built the walls of Hatunrumiyoc created some of the most intricate stonework known in the world, without using hard metal tools. Each stone is a unique polygonal shape. Sides have been cut to an either convex or concave to fit into the adjoining stones. Finished stones lock into place like pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Stones were shaped by pounding and grinding, technology that was simple but time and labor intensive.

A number of Inka walls, built in the 15th and 16th centuries, still survive in Cuzco. They are often augmented, as this one has been, by later masonry created by Andean masons for Spanish patrons.

In 16th- and 17th-century Cuzco, the rebuilding of the city after the wars of Conquest meant Inka history was an ever-present part of colonial life. Early on, the transformation from an indigenous capital to a colonial city was fraught by ethnic conflict and challenges to Spanish authority by surviving members of the Inka royal family. By the 17th century, wealthy Creoles traveling through Cuzco on horseback or foot would likely have seen the ancient Inka walls they encountered as simply a part of the city’s layout, as would have the hundreds of indigenous people who walked Cuzco’s streets on their way to market or with llamas bearing loads.

Barbara E. Mundy

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Cummins, Thomas B.F. 1996. “A Tale of Two Cities: Cuzco, Lima, and the Construction of Colonial Representation.” In Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America. D. Fane, ed. Pp. 157-170. Brooklyn, New York: The Brooklyn Museum and Harry Abrams.

Gasparini, Graziano and Luise Margolies. 1977. Arquitectura inka. Caracas: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas and Estéticas, Faculdad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad Central de Venezuela.

Gasparini, Graziano and Luise Margolies. 1980. Inca Architecture. Trans. Patricia Lyons. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kubler, George. 1952. Cuzco: Reconstruction of the Town and Restoration of its Monuments. Paris: UNESCO.