Cusco: Qorikancha

While we visited several churches and other sites in Cusco, there were only two museums that really interested us: Qorikancha, aka the Saint Dominic Priory, and the Casa Concha, the Machu Picchu museum that features the Yale University items returned to Peru from the Hiram Bingham expeditions of 1911-1912. Qorikancha is a monastery built over the foundations of a major Incan site, the temples of the sun and the moon and such. As elsewhere, the Incan building, well, the traces of it, are impressive, the stone work, the scope, etc. FWIW, this is the building whose gold-plated walls, golden sculpture, and other objects took the Spanish three months to melt down and cart away.

Approaching Qorikancha; the lower curved bit is characteristically
Incan

Closer up

Floor plan, for the greater glory, etc.

Incan remains

Trapezoidal door...the Incans loved the circus,
especially the daring young man on the flying
trapezoid

Helpful model #1,343

Cloister; interesting to see all the Spanish architecture not
overlaying the more impressive Moorish precedents

Spare parts

Holy Circumcision #1,227

Crowning Mary Queen of Heaven; note the
interesting depiction of the Holy Threesome,
all the same person, three aspects of which...
and no White Dove and no Old Guy with
White Beard...

Outside, looking at the Incan stone work; integral buttressing
writ large

Nicely landscaped, as nearly all these sites are

The famous 14-angled stone

Larger perspective

Muy interessant...The Incans saw gods and animals in the
heavens, like the Greeks and Romans and others, but they
saw them via the negative space; see illustration; better yet,
go look at the Milky Way

Inside the curvy bit

If they could do this, how come they never figured out an arch?