Ancient Lost Tunnels in Peru finally found? - The Legendary Chincanas

For over 400 years, the legend of Cusco's hidden underground tunnels have kept explorers, treasure hunters, and archaeologists up at night, wondering what exactly is the truth behind these legendary tunnels and what ancient secrets they may be holding. Now many people claim to have seen the entrances to the tunnels and some people claim to even have been inside of them. But for one reason or another, they were sworn to secrecy to never reveal their location or what they saw in them. These tunnels may sound mythical, but there are actually historical first-hand accounts from nearly 500 years ago that state that they are in fact real. And nearly 500 years after the disappearance of these tunnels, archaeologists in Cusco are now determined to solve this ancient mystery, finally. And at the end of this video, I'll tell you how you can join me in being a part of this discovery and support the archaeological team in Cusco trying to find these tunnels. But first, let's take a step back nearly 500 years to the very first accounts of these mysterious tunnels that we call Chincanas. And we start with Garcilaso de la Vega. He was born in 1539 as the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador named Sebastian de la Vega. He was raised in Peru until the age of 21, where he learned the ways of the native people, the history of the Inca Empire, as well as learning to speak both Spanish and the Inca language, Quechua. Following his father's death, Garcilaso set sail for Spain to reclaim his father's fame, fortune, and to pursue a higher education. And it was later in his life that he reflected on his time growing up in Peru, and in 1609 published one of the most revered accounts of the Inca world ever written, called Royal Commentaries of the Incas. He describes visiting the tunnels beneath the Coricancha as a boy, and tells us that he believed these tunnels extended off in all directions beneath Cusco, extending out beneath Saqsaywaman, as well as far off into the Andes. Now, Garcilaso de la Vega may have been decades removed from his time in Peru when he wrote his Royal Commentaries of the Incas, but this is such a specific memory that he recalls from his childhood that I don't think this is something that he is unintentionally making up. I think this is certainly something he absolutely experienced. There were tunnels beneath them so that one could pass from one to the others below ground as well as above it. The tunnels were made with great skill. There were so many underground passages, large and small, twisting and turning in all directions with so many doors, all of the same size, but some opening on one side and some on the other, that anyone entering the maze soon lost his way and was at a loss to find a way out. Even the most experienced dared not to enter without a guide. When I was a boy, I often went up to the fortress with others of my own age, and though the stonework part of the building was already ruined, I mean the part that was above ground and even a good deal part below the surface, we never dared enter certain parts of remaining vaults except as far as light of the sun penetrated, lest we should get lost inside, which was the fear the Indians taught us. So as you can see, this is something that is much, much more than just mythical. These are real visceral memories that Garcilaso de la Vega is calling upon and things that he actually experienced. I mean, he's telling us step by step things that he experienced as a young boy, wanting to explore these tunnels or being interested in them, and then being told by the Indians to not go so far that the light of the sun can't guide you any longer because you'll get lost in them forever. So this is not something that he is just misremembering decades later as an old man. This is a very specific memory that he's telling us about, which in my opinion, just solidifies the reality that these are real tunnels. The next account is a Jesuit chronicler that actually corroborates Garcilago's account of the tunnels, and it comes from nine years earlier in the year 1600. However, this account places the tunnels entrance at Sacsayhuaman rather than beneath the Cor a Concha, which is traditionally the location of the tunnels networks entrance. And this account also places the tunnels entrance at Sacsayhuaman rather than beneath the Cor a Concha, which is traditionally the location of the tunnels entrance in modern times. More likely though, these tunnel systems begin and end in at least two locations, but possibly and most likely many more. And more than two centuries later, American archaeologist Ephraim Squire documented seeing the entrance to a subterranean passage located at Sacsayhuaman leading out into other areas of Cusco. His research relied on colonial era accounts of the tunnels. Some of these accounts we either no longer have access to or just no longer exist. And there are so, so many lost colonial era accounts of first contacts or discoveries that the Europeans were making throughout the pre-Columbian world that are just completely lost to us today. There's an entire world of information about the pre-Columbian world from the conquistador point of view that is just completely gone. Who knows what kind of documents that have just eroded away in some Spanish basement that could have illuminated not only the Inca world, but the rest of the Americas for us. There's just so much that these first explorers saw that was written down and just doesn't survive 500 years later. And this has led to so many myths and legends about the chinkanas that we can neither prove nor disprove having not quite found them yet. One of the stories that I've heard is kind of funny. It's the story of the Golden Cob. Now, the first accounts of conquistadors seeing the city of Cusco, it was absolutely amazing. And there was even a place that has been named in post-colonial times called the Garden of the Gods or the Golden Garden that existed in Cusco, where every bush and animal and flower and insect and tree was made entirely out of gold. And even the roofs of the Inca households in Cusco and the temple houses were lined with gold as well. This was an incredibly, incredibly wealthy city, maybe perhaps the wealthiest city in all of the pre-Columbian Americas as far as we know. And so inherently, one of the legends about this city, when we're talking about the legendary tunnels beneath them, is a lot of people think that this Golden Cob, as well as other golden artifacts that would have belonged to the Inca emperor, were stored away in these chinkanas far, far underground so that the Spaniards would never find them. Well, I don't know the veracity of something like that. I don't know how true that is. I do know that pre-Columbian Americans did not necessarily view gold as imbued with the same kind of wealth necessarily that the conquistadors did. The Aztecs, when they saw how much the Spanish essentially lusted after the gold and that they would kill for it and that their eyes widened and they became like ravaged dogs for the gold, they were kind of taken aback by this because their use of gold tells us that they know that gold had valuable properties and that it was malleable and that it was essentially eternal, it would last forever, that you could never damage it, that there was something divine about gold. I think that pre-Columbian Americans gave gold a spiritual, esoteric, religious significance and not necessarily the significance of wealth. So I don't know that the Inca emperor's initial instinct would have been to hide these gold artifacts from the Spaniards. I just don't know. Now here's one that I have spoken with Peruvian archaeologists about and I can never quite get a firm grasp as to what actually happened. But these stories seem to go from the mid to late 1800s all the way to the mid 1900s of explorers and treasure hunters going down inside the chinkanas and becoming lost and never being seen again, never being able to be found and somehow this prompted the Peruvian government to essentially dynamite the tunnels and blow up the entrances so that no one would ever become lost in them again. But I just don't know if the Peruvian government would actually do such a thing. That's kind of the hard part about the pre-Columbian world is that it is filled with a lot of myths and a lot of legends and things essentially get perpetuated so quickly and it's really hard to find out what exactly happened. We're really on the pre-Columbian archaeology in some ways is sort of like the Wild West and we're just now kind of getting the reins of pre-Columbian archaeology and understanding really what's going on. Then in the 1940s there was supposedly a Dominican friar and church bell ringer who discovered the entrance of the chinkana beneath the Spanish church that was built over the Corocancha which the Corocancha was the central temple dedicated to the sun in the middle of the ancient city of Cusco. And according to the Dominican friar, this chamber as a part of the chinkanas beneath the Corocancha was said to have been filled entirely full of gold and Inca artifacts. But they had to swear to secrecy so none of the treasure was removed and the entrance was never revealed. There is also another count from the 1980s of a man being led into the tunnel system by a priest working at the Corocancha and he too was sworn to secrecy and the entrance location was again never revealed. So again there's legends, there's myths, there's people who say they've seen them, they've seen the entrance, they've gone inside the entrance, they've seen the tunnels, they've seen artifacts inside the tunnels, but yet no photo has been officially produced and no exact location of the tunnels has ever been given thus far. For centuries people have speculated and spread rumors about the location of the chinkanas but it wasn't until November 2024 that ground penetrating radar surveys officially detected a void beneath Sacsayhuaman and in 2025 excavations have begun under the direction of Peruvian archaeologist Jorge Calero Flores who I've actually had the pleasure of meeting and performing an Inca sunrise ceremony with last year and just last month I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the excavation and was even allowed to enter another void that was recently found inside Sacsayhuaman's fortress as well. The further they excavate the GPR continues to detect a cavity below the excavation site and it could be just another few weeks or months before they finally broken into the lost tunnel system. Jorge's team has also expanded their search from Sacsayhuaman down into Cusco just across the street from the Corocancha and I was shown this location where Peruvian archaeologists believe they may be able to access the tunnels branching out from beneath the temple. So what actually were the chinkanas? I have seen so many theories about this but what is actually realistic? It's commonly said that the archaeological side of Sacsayhuaman is actually a fortress. You just look at it and it sort of looks like that. It's on the edge of this hillside and it has these huge walls all the way around it with only a single entrance at the very front. It looks like something that could be a military fortress and it's commonly theorized or people have been saying for centuries including Garcilaso de la Vega that the tunnels branch out from Sacsayhuaman down into Cusco potentially into the Corocancha and other parts of the city that have been just covered up in the modern day. But one of the ideas that's commonly proposed is that say during an invasion now we're talking about the pre-Columbian era so long before the conquistadors are there say if ancient Cusco were invaded by an enemy tribe or civilization the emperor would have an escape route from inside the city of Cusco up into the fortress of Sacsayhuaman or perhaps vice versa. But I don't know I mean I don't know exactly how realistic this is. The Inca certainly were very adept at warfare but that kind of war where the Inca are being invaded in their own city wasn't something that necessarily happened or that we have proof of. More so how the Inca expanded their empire or how they engaged in warfare was well trying to avoid war at all costs. So essentially what they would do is in the sacred valley they have these farms that would grow from the ground all the way up the mountainside well into the sky from one horizon all the way to the other. And they were able to produce enough food to feed millions and millions and millions of people just from this one sacred valley alone. Which Cusco lucky enough for the Inca had entire control of. And so what they would do is they would go to a culture or civilization that was seasonally starving and maybe they were getting attacked by people on their borders and essentially the Inca would tell them hey we see that you guys need protection. We see that you guys need food. So I'm going to offer you something. I'm going to allow you to remain king of your city. I'm going to build you a house or a palace in my capital city of Cusco. I'm going to be your emperor. You're going to serve me and I'm going to allow you to remain king of your domain. But you're going to pay you're going to pay my city taxes and tomorrow I'm going to show up with 20,000 people to bring you more food than you've ever had and soldiers to protect your city. And if you don't do that I will just completely annihilate your entire city. And almost always as far as we know basically always that king thought that that was a pretty good deal and would become assimilated into the Inca Empire. So the idea that they're building escape route tunnels inside Cusco specifically for the king to be able to get out of Cusco up into the fortress of Sacsayhuaman. I just don't know. I would put that further down on my list of possibilities. And as I addressed earlier I don't think that it was a secret cache for hiding treasure from the Spaniards. That sounds like a tremendous amount of work and the Inca wouldn't have had enough time from the time that the Spaniards showed up to the time that they conquered Cusco is like that. It's basically immediate. So it's it's not a secret cache for the emperor's gold either. It's something other than that. My guess is it's probably two things at the same time all around the pre-Columbian world sites like Teotihuacan and Mitla and Yaxchilan and Chichen Itza are built over or right next to natural underground caverns that have been modified for the use of pre-Columbian peoples. And we don't really know what their perception was of natural cave systems and why exactly they modified them and what their belief about them was esoterically spiritually religiously cosmologically we we don't really understand their understanding of these. But all throughout the pre-Columbian world there were cities built over natural cave systems and Cusco is no exception. But why did they do this? Again we just we really have no idea. This is something about their worldview that is utterly lost to us after the complete evisceration of pre-Columbian civilization. But one of the things that we do know is that during festivals high priests or even kings who typically acted as the high priest would go down into these caves or go down into these man-made underground labyrinths and as he's descending down he may be wearing one garb and while he's down there he changes into something else he performs some kind of ritual to the god of the underworld or to the underworld itself or the cosmological personification of the underworld we just really don't understand and he would emerge from the other end surrounded by the people in his civilization as a part of this festival of some kind and what the intricacies are there we just don't know but my guess is that it has something to do with their sacred worldview their cosmological view their religion their idea of spirituality and probably it had some kind of regular function in festivals all throughout the pre-Columbian world they're always participating in festivals even in modern world every single night when I was in Cusco and in fact almost every Latin city that I go to there is a native festival of some kind usually a modern version of a native festival that is being performed in the town square and it's basically every single night so you can just imagine the party was constantly going in the pre-Columbian world and I just think it's pretty likely that these chinkanas were used in some way somehow for festival activities as well as who knows maybe a dozen other things what's happening in Peru right now really could result in one of the greatest discoveries ever made in the western hemisphere and you can join me in being a part of this discovery I've partnered with Jorge Flores team in Cusco on this video to share the story of the legendary chinkanas and you can help the campaign by donating to Jorge's team which is linked here on the screen or linked in the description in the comment section below your donations help provide the team with all of the equipment and the budget that they need to discover these legendary tunnels donors can receive anything from private access to the most recent information coming out from the excavations every single week to even being a part of the excavation yourself and hanging out with the excavation crew click the Indiegogo link somewhere on the screen or in the description in the comment section below to be a part of one of the most incredible archaeological discoveries ever made and help us make the biggest discovery in Peru since the discovery of Machu Picchu