Cuy vey!

In preparation for my annual trip, I typically do enough research about the places I’ll visit to convince myself that I have a general notion of what should make that place interesting. For some reason, when thinking of the Sacred Valley in Peru, I went little beyond this map:

[Map from Globus Tours].

In preparation for writing this blog, I looked at maps of the places we’d visited and was a bit surprised to see that it seemed a bit haphazard. The previous several posts described my visits to Chinchero, Moray, and Maras. Here’s that route courtesy of Google Maps.

If you look closely, you’ll see we traveled quite far to the east-northeast and were, in fact, only about 30 kilometers from Ollantaytambo where we would finish our day today. Perhaps more curiously, today we’d travel nearly directly east from Cusco to Pisac before turning slightly to the northwest toward Ollantaytambo. The route seemed less haphazard when I remembered that, just as we’d gotten close to Lake Titikaka on our day trip to Tiwanaku and followed that the next day by going to the lake. Yesterday’s tour had been an optional add on to the included local tours so when Wednesday took us on this route

heading east to Pisaq then turning to the northwest to Ollantaytambo, passing just east of Moray, the routes through and around the Sacred Valley made more sense. Now that I’ve gotten my preamble off my chest, let’s take a look at the places we visited.

Was the Sacred Valley truly sacred?

The ruins at Machu Picchu are almost certainly the most famous in Perú. That’s  understandable as you’ll see when we reach there tomorrow. However, there are other impressive sites not only in the Sacred Valley but throughout the country and, while we saw only a small section of the ruins at Pisaq, this site just as surely qualifies as impressive.

But before I tell you a bit about Pisaq, I’m going to take a more comprehensive look at the Sacred Valley itself. The valley follows the path of the Urubamba River for roughly 60 kilometers from Pisaq in the southeast to Ollaytambo in the northwest. (Some consider that it stretches as far as Aguas Calientes which sits at the foot of Machu Picchu another 40 kilometers up the river. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is more accurate.) The Quechua name for the river is Wilqamayu which translates roughly as Sacred River.

If you recall the map of the Milky Way that we saw at Qorikancha, you saw that the galaxy held celestial importance in the spiritual lives of the Inkas. The Wilqamayu was for them the terrestrial representation of the Milky Way. In their view, its path mirrored that of its heavenly partner. (The river is also sometimes called Vilkanota or Willkanuta in Aymara which means “House of the Sun”.) Though we have no definitive evidence, we can reasonably conclude that if they used the same term for the valley as they did for the river, then the valley would have also been deemed sacred. However, we don’t know this with certainty.

Even if it wasn’t explicitly considered sacred, the valley has other traits that would have conveyed high importance on it. Its floor is exceptionally fertile and has been intensively farmed since at least the time of the Chanapata (who developed the salt extraction methods used at Maras).

By the time the Inkas came to rule the area, the valley’s main crop was maize which was important not only as a food product but because it served as the basis for chicha – the corn-based fermentation that was so important to so many Inkan rituals. (Today, using methods little changed from their ancestors, the people of the valley still produce corn but they have added peaches, avocados, and other grains to meet a demand coming mainly from Cusco.)

This productivity stems largely from the fact that the floor of the valley sits 500 meters or more below surrounding mountains and the nearby Inkan sites. With a year-round monthly average temperature between 12 and 15 degrees it isn’t subject to the wide temperature variations present in the higher elevations. The Inkas, as we have seen, were exceptionally skilled water managers and adjusted for the clearly defined limits of the rainy season with an extensive irrigation system thereby increasing the valley’s production.

Typically, under their system of reciprocity, when the Inkas expanded their territory either through conquest or diplomacy, one-third of the new land would become the property of the Sapa Inka, one-third was given to religious use, and the remaining third to the local population.  From the time of Manco Qhapaq, however, the entire Valley belonged to the Sapa Inka alone and was not divided as was the rest of the Tawantinsuyu. This provides another indication of its importance.

Each Sapa Inka chose an animal as his personal deity or spirit guide – usually from one found among the Inka constellations – thus replicating the night sky in the Sacred Valley. The nature and type of animal would then determine the location of a particular Inka’s wak’a and his personal estate which was then inherited by his descendants.

Thus, we have clear indications that the valley was of great importance to the Sapa Inka. Since it wasn’t divided as Inkan tradition would have demanded with a third going to a religious purpose, it’s not quite as clear whether it was viewed as sacred.

I’ll begin part two of this post with our stop in Pisaq a site that one Peruvian tourist website calls “a little piece of paradise in Perú’s Sacred Valley.”

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the full explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.