Qorikancha: the golden garden and the Chinkana

Look at the grassy terraces stepping down from the curved wall. According to Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Cusco in 1539, there was once a garden here like no other: maize plants with stalks, leaves and cobs of gold, golden llamas with their herders, butterflies and lizards of precious metal.

1The gold that was melted down

Garcilaso wrote his work in Spain, decades later, and some details may be idealised. But other chroniclers agree that the temple was dazzling. In 1533, Pizarro’s envoys stripped gold plates from its walls for Atahualpa’s ransom, and almost all of it ended up melted into ingots. Not a single leaf of the garden survives.

2The Chinkana

In Quechua, chinkana comes from the verb ‘to get lost’. Since colonial times people have said that a secret tunnel linked Qorikancha with Sacsayhuamán, high on the hill. The popular version adds explorers who went in and never came back, and an entrance walled up by the authorities to prevent further tragedies.

The tunnel legend is centuries old; scientific proof, if it comes, will be very recent.

In 2025 a team led by archaeologists Jorge Calero and Mildred Fernández announced that ground-penetrating radar and seismic surveys had detected an underground passage they link to that route. The find is still being studied and has not been definitively confirmed, so for now the full tunnel remains a matter of tradition.

3What to look for

• The terraces where the legendary golden garden is said to have been.
• The curved wall, which has withstood every earthquake.
• The line of the hill to the north, where Sacsayhuamán stands, the other end of the supposed tunnel.