Calle Loreto: the alley of Inca walls

Walk a few steps and look both ways: few places in the world keep an entire street lined with original Inca walls. This passage, often called Intik’ijllu in Quechua, ‘the alley of the Sun’, linked the great square with the Qorikancha district.

1The serpent palace

The wall beside the Church of the Society of Jesus belonged, according to the chronicles, to Amarukancha, ‘the enclosure of the serpent’, a palace attributed to the Inca Huayna Cápac, father of Huáscar and Atahualpa. After the conquest the plot passed to the Pizarro family and later to the Jesuits, who built their church and college there.

2The house of the chosen women

The wall opposite was part of the Acllawasi, the ‘house of the acllas’. Women selected from across the empire lived here, weaving the finest textiles and preparing chicha for ceremonies. When the Spanish arrived, the complex passed into private hands and, in the early 17th century, the convent of Santa Catalina moved in. It still occupies the site today.

A house of women consecrated to the Sun became a convent of nuns: the colonial city was almost always built on top of the Inca one.

3What to look for

• The regular courses of almost rectangular blocks: a technique archaeologists call coursed or ‘sedimentary’ masonry, reserved for important buildings.
• The slight inward lean of the walls, a typical feature of Inca architecture that helped them withstand earthquakes.
• Two eras meeting: Inca stone below, whitewashed adobe and colonial balconies above.