Inti Raymi — the festival of the sun

Inti Raymi unfolds on 24 June across three of Cusco's old Inca stages. It begins at the Qorikancha, the Inca sun temple over which the Spanish built a church, where the figure of the Sapa Inca invokes the rising sun; it moves to the Plaza de Armas, the old Huacaypata, for an address to the assembled nations; and it climbs to the vast esplanade of Sacsayhuamán above the city, at some 3,700 metres, for the central rite — a reconstruction of the solstice ceremony with hundreds of costumed performers, the Sapa Inca and Qoya carried on litters, processions of the four quarters of the empire, offerings, music and a staged sacrifice (a llama, symbolically, in the modern pageant) read for omens of the coming year. The whole is performed in Quechua. It is openly a reconstruction: banned by the Spanish in 1572 and dark for nearly four centuries, it was rebuilt in 1944 by Cusco intellectuals drawing on the colonial-era chronicle of the part-Inca writer Garcilaso de la Vega, as an assertion of Andean identity and pride. That history is worth holding honestly — neither dismissing the pageant as invented spectacle nor overstating an unbroken line. What is alive is real: it is the largest festival in Cusco, owned by the city, performed by its people, and woven into a wider Andean reverence for the sun and the mountains that never died. Tens of thousands fill the hillsides; ticketed stands ring the Sacsayhuamán esplanade.