Ingapirca

On Sunday we drove to Ingapirca, the best example of Inca ruins in Ecuador.  Our Yanapuma (Spanish school) friends Peter (from Bloomington, MN) and Richard (from San Francisco, CA) went with.  Peter has been to Ecuador before, and rented and drove the car.

Our Rental Car

The drive took about 2 hours.  As we left Cuenca we drove through suburbs and what appeared to be bedroom communities.  Further out it became much more rural, with smaller towns and villages.  With the exception of some of the more rugged hills and mountains, most were under cultivation or used for grazing.

Area Houses

Landscape Near Ingapirca

When we reached Ingapirca we got tickets for a guided tour.  The audience consisted of us and folks from Poland, Czech Republic, and Netherlands.  Ecuador has become quite an international tourist destination.

From Wikipedia:

Ingapirca (Kichwa: Inkapirka, “Inca wall”) is a town in Cañar Province, Ecuador, and the name of the older Inca ruins and archeological site nearby.

These are the largest known Inca ruins in Ecuador. The most significant building is the Temple of the Sun, an elliptically shaped building constructed around a large rock. The building is constructed in the Inca way without mortar, as are most of the structures in the complex. The stones were carefully chiseled and fashioned to fit together perfectly. The Temple of the Sun was positioned so that on the solstices, at exactly the right time of day, sunlight would fall through the center of the doorway of the small chamber at the top of the temple. Most of this chamber has fallen down.

As it turns out, the Inca were only around for about 200 years.  They made a quick expansion from the south, but when they came to the Canari, they met fierce warriors.  Eventually, they married into the Canari royalty and took over anyhow.

By the time the Spanish came, brothers were fighting over it, and it was quite weakened.

This site was discovered and excavated starting in 1962.  By that time it was a farm owned by the priests in Cuenca.  They had taken many of the carved stones an shipped them to Cuenca as foundations for churches and other buildings.  The local farmers, seeing this behavior, started taking them too for foundations and livestock pens.  Once the excavations revealed the richness of the site, many of the local stones were recovered.

Our tour guide was quite animated, and very knowledgeable.  He went into great detail about the strategic location of the site, both militarily and astronomically.

Here are pics. Click on any of them for slideshow mode:

Carved Stones of Sun Temple

Burial Site of High Priest

Irrigation System

Holes Were Filled with Water to Read Star Reflections

Ruins

Town of Ingapirca

No Safety Railings Here

Carved Stones Recovered from Local Farmers

Dos Llamas

Neighboring Valley

Ruins

Temple of the Sun

Entry Going Up to Sun Temple

Una Llama

Sun Temple – Sunset Facing

Ruins

Replica of Original Buildings

Sun Temple – Sunrise Facing

Grain Silos in the Foreground

Touring Amidst the Llamas

Ruins

Canari (indigenous) Women Tending to Livestock

Rooms of Virgins, (at least when they arrived – they were trained to be concubines to kings)