Cuzco is still a wonderful sight today. The name means "navel" in Quechua, and the city stands folded in on itself at the head of its valley, in a bowl of hills overlooked by the higher peaks of the Andes. It lies above 11,000 feet and has a high-altitude climate, with crystalline light, crisp air, and, by day at least, a scorching sun which brings out the dazzling colours of the red hills, the whitewashed adobe walls, and the matt-black stone of Inca masonry, which still forms the foundations of the city.

This was the heartland of the Incas — the "navel of the earth," as they called it. For, although the founding myth of the Incas took them back to the Isle of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, Cuzco was the origin place of the dynasty — to be precise the sacred rock, just outside the city where the first Inca, Manco Capac, had sunk his golden rod.

Although Cuzco had a population of more than 50,000 in Pizarro's time, many were part of the vast service-industries attached to the royal court and the households of the various lineages. Each branch of the royal family maintained palaces in huge walled enclosures grouped around the grand plaza in the center.

Cuzco had been rebuilt by Inca Pachacuti in the 1440s and 1450s, after a victory over the Chancas, the Incas' old rivals. During a twenty-year building period, 50,000 workers had remade the city in the shape of a puma, its head the gigantic fortress above the city at Sacsuaman, its tail near the great curving enclosure of the Coricancha, the Sun Temple. From this place, the sacred heart of the city, lines of shrines, that marked out the sacred landscape, were spread out to all four quarters.