Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City

Cuzco's carefully planned layout, featuring palaces and temples of superb stone masonry, astonished the city's first Spanish visitors and settlers. Despite their admiration, from its Spanish foundation in 1534 to the late 1580s Cuzco was reshaped into a colonial city. Several Inca walls and parts of the structures did survive. However, the lack of Indigenous and sixteenth-century Spanish visual representations hinders the reconstruction of the physiognomy of both the Inca and the early colonial city. Although more research is still needed, Inca Cuzco has been addressed in book chapters, articles, and more importantly, two monographs: Santiago Agurto Calvo's Cusco: La traza urbana de la ciudad inca (1980) and Ian Farrington's Cusco: Urbanism and Archaeology in the Inka World (2013). Colonial Cuzco has been studied more extensively, particularly in Harold Wethey's Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru (1949) and Graciela Maria Viñuales's El espacio urbano en el Cusco colonial: Uso y...