6 Ancient Inca Buildings Hidden in Plain Sight

Most people who travel to Peru probably walk right by some of the most impressive megalithic architecture ever erected in the ancient world, without even realizing it. Peru is filled with some of the greatest mysteries anywhere in the ancient world. The megalithic towering stones of Sacsayhuaman and Ollantaytambo, the ruins of Machu Picchu, lost cities and uncontacted tribes hidden deep in the Peruvian Amazon, the fanged werejaguar deity that seems to emerge from the Amazon jungle and spread all throughout the Andean world, even up into the Olmec civilization. But there are some mysteries that people walk right past every day and don't even realize it. We've all heard the famous line, it's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. But in reality, both are true. 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Now today, Cusco has the appearance of a Spaniard colonial city with European architecture, urban layouts, square Spanish villas with open courtyards and towering cathedrals placed at the crown of every plaza in town. Thousands of people pack the narrow streets roaming from hotel to restaurant to the market and eventually the main plaza where inevitably some kind of parade is almost always taking place. But modern Cusco holds an ancient secret. Beneath its foundations are the ruins of Peru's most powerful ancient civilization, the Inca capital city of Cusco. And as you walk the city streets, if you look closely and know where to go, you can see the modern colonial building standing on top of the Inca walls and foundations. And once you begin to notice it, it becomes impossible to miss. Colonial period Spanish architecture was fairly crude, rubble and mortar construction. The Spanish used the well-defined ancient city grid and street layout to build their own city. They attempted to dismantle the megalithic stonework of the ancient city and where they couldn't dismantle the stones, they built a new facade of Spanish architecture around the ancient buildings to conceal and hide the achievements and heritage of the Inca people, attempting to subject them to a new colonial way of life and to forget their native heritage. But the Spanish colonial architecture was far less substantial than what the natives were capable of. And you can even find mention of this incredible Inca architecture found in Spanish chronicles. We don't know exactly where the precipice or the origin of this kind of megalithic and precise architecture truly comes from. Although it's often speculated that the origins for this impressive stonework originated at Tiwanaku, I wonder if there isn't a chapter of South American history that we're missing here. As Tiwanaku seems to have inherited the religion and iconography of an even older culture known as Chavin. However, the stonework at Tiwanaku is a considerable leap forward in technology and technique. Nonetheless, ancient Cusco is likely the result of an unknown number of millennia of ancient South Americans perfecting megalithic stonework that can withstand centuries of earthquakes. Cusco's original stone architecture has an unmistakable character once you know what to look for. The traditional explanation as to how these walls were created was by an immense and probably expensive working class of stonemasons who cut, hammered, and tirelessly pecked away at the andesite blocks to create these geometric patterns which perfectly interlock the stones. But there are quite a lot of independent researchers and experts in the field who think that we don't quite have the full story here or a full understanding as to how these stones were carved and interlocked to one another. And while there are a lot of ideas floated around like ancient aliens and ancient lost high technology, I tend to like Dr. Ed Barnhart's theory. But I do know that they make a lot of jewelry out of fluorite. In the Inca Museum, we'll see all this fluorite jewelry. They're also miners of gold and silver. And today, Peru has this horrible problem of sulfuric acid pouring out of these mines because that's how they get the ore out of the stone. They use the sulfuric acid and it pours out. But if you combine sulfuric acid and fluorite, you make HF. Which is, if any of you saw Breaking Bad, remember that moment where they're trying to burn up the body in HF and he puts it in a bathtub and it goes right through the ceiling? Like plastic, it doesn't do it. But I think if you brought those two inert substances here and like soaked leaves on them, they would do a reaction until the substance burned itself out. And that could be totally crackpot. That could be crazy. I've asked the city of Cusco if I could take samples and I have chemists up in the states take samples and try to find between some of these walls whether the chemists tell me if it is HF or something, we can tell you what acid it is. It's a popular notion to believe that the Incas were not the original stone masons of all the megalithic architecture found around the Sacred Valley. But if any known civilization in the Andes had the power and organization to erect some of the most impressive monuments in the entire ancient world, it was the Incas. No previously known culture had the reach, organization, and power that the Inca Empire had as a result of the wealth produced from the terraces lining every mountainside found throughout the Sacred Valley. This immense amount of food production may have unlocked the limitless capacity of the empire, allowing them to achieve things never seen before. Now, I'm not against the idea of looking for a highly advanced or developed ancient lost civilization. And in fact, I think if we were to look for one anywhere, it might just be South America. But I also think it is equally likely that the Inca achieved these amazing feats and simultaneously left an incomplete archaeological record with very few clues as to how they achieved these things. And maybe that's what they wanted. Ancient Cusco is perhaps the premier somewhat intact example of urbanization throughout the pre-Columbian Americas. Teotihuacan in the Mexican Valley would be another great example if most of it were excavated. However, the city was abandoned nearly 1,000 years before even the Aztecs arrived in Mesoamerica and the majority of its urban centers still have not been excavated. Tenochtitlan, the later Aztec capital, was said to have harbored over 60,000 people per day in its market. But the city was almost entirely destroyed, buried, and built over after being conquered by the Spanish. So we have no way of studying the ancient Aztec capital in the kind of depth that we do with the Inca capital. At the center of the city is the Coricancha or the Temple of the Sun. This was certainly one of or may have been the most important building throughout the Inca Empire. Spanish chroniclers tell us that it was built to worship the sun god Inti and that its walls and even the roofs were plated in gold. On the exterior of the modern day Coricancha you can see the Spanish convent of Santo Domingo built on top of the Inca walls and foundations. But hidden within the convent are what I've referred to as the most razor sharp and precisely built structures in all of the ancient world. We're standing inside the Coricancha, the center of the Inca universe and this is what's left of the Temple of the Sun. This rock, this single stone here is one of the great examples of the sophistication of this architecture. It starts here but it's a single stone that follows here. It takes the corner here. It should be two stones but look at the seam. It's not. It's the same stone coming around here all the way over to here and again look closely into there. That's the same stone. It's not a seam. It's a single stone that comes all the way over to here. So 24 different angles in this single stone. After visiting Egypt twice since my last visit to Peru, it was overwhelmingly obvious that the Inca architecture in its precision is even more impressive than the vast majority if not all of the temples in Egypt or anywhere else in the world for that matter. The stones fit together so tightly that even a hair couldn't fit between them. The walls lean in on themselves to provide more stability during earthquakes which ancient Peruvians were keenly aware of. As the record of anti-seismic architecture goes back thousands of years in Peru including the Pyramids of Lima which used vertical blocks that allowed the structure to sway and wobble during an earthquake preventing it from collapsing. The Corocancha was also an astronomical observatory but its full use and the extent of its architectural alignments with celestial bodies is not precisely understood. The Spanish were aware of these uses though and by erecting a massive building over the Corocancha it cut off the temple's power usage and purpose. Now this is something that I think a parallel can be found in in the Maya world. There were explorers in the 1800s like Stevens and Catherwood that are beginning in Belize and going all the way up through the Yucatan documenting all of these various different Maya cities that are lost in the jungles. Now the jungles much like these Spanish convents that are being built over these Inca temples they are hiding and concealing the astronomical celestial alignments that the buildings are built for. And a lot of the explorers throughout Mesoamerica throughout the Maya world in particular were confused at why the Maya city layout isn't quite uniform in the way that you might see in the old world. Why do all of these buildings point slightly towards the northeast or slightly towards the northwest and they're not all quite aligned with each other. Well it wasn't until archaeologists began to cut the jungle canopy away and reveal the city that you were able to watch the celestial movements and realize that many of these temples were like celestial clocks or aligned to astronomical bodies or astronomical cycles. So by the Spaniards covering up the Corocancha and so many other Inca buildings with their own buildings on top it essentially cut off the power and the esoteric meaning behind the building which was exactly what they were going for. They wanted to erase the Inca identity so that future generations would forget what they were once capable of and what they once believed in and essentially forced them to submit into a new European and Christian lifestyle. Now just around the block from my hotel which was also built into the ruins of a foundation of an ancient Inca building was the Palace of Inca Roca. This is the ancient building containing the mind-blowing cyclopean andesite stones that you can find in Cusco which I actually find more impressive and beautiful than even the stones of Saqsaywaman. The Palace of Inca Roca is also famous for its 12 angled stone which was recently battered by a local Peruvian in the middle of the night who was under the influence wielding a hammer causing six irreversible impacts that chipped away parts of the stone. He was almost immediately identified and apprehended by the Peruvian National Police and is facing up to six years in prison, one for each strike he laid to the stone. Nonetheless, the Palace of Inca Roca is an architectural marvel mostly unlike anywhere else on earth even distinguishing itself from other Inca sites. Each block is carved into an irregular shape interlocking with the blocks around it and each block is made of andesite which is a volcanic stone harder than basalt more similar in hardness to granite. In fact, these blocks are often inaccurately called granite due to their similarity. The legend behind the building comes from the Inca stories that were told to the Spanish. They said that this building was once used as the palace for the sixth Inca ruler but more details of the building's usage whether it was completely domestic spiritual or a political building or perhaps all three at once is completely unknown. Now this is actually the temple that I spoke about with Joe Rogan where I said that a lot of the stones in the Inca world look like they were smushed together with the lower block having an upward curving lip almost as if the outer part of the blocks were softened before they were placed together and when they were placed together they became smushed creating these outward sloping lips. Furthermore, you can see on many other blocks around the palace where it at least looks like an acid was spilled onto the stone or soft portions of the stones outer part were being scooped away or cleaned off. Now this acid theory has not been definitively proven or properly tested but my hope is that someday in the future somebody will adequately prove or disprove this theory. Today the palace of Inca Roca is the Archbishop's Palace and Cusco's Museum of Art. All around Cusco you can see the lower walls perimeter and foundations that were laid by the natives. Sometimes even entire doorways with enormous lentils can be seen leading into modern day shops and restaurants. In some places the stones were quarried or ripped away, recut, and repurposed into new buildings with much less impressive craftsmanship. Take a look at this KFC for example. Look at that. It's an Inca KFC. 800 year old temple now serving fried chicken. Now I recorded this video on my first trip to Peru so I wasn't as familiar with the distinction between the modern lookalike walls and the genuine walls. But this KFC was actually constructed out of real ancient Inca stones except they were recut and re-put back together in a much less impressive way. Which looks nice from a distance but once you get up close you realize that even the modern stonework is much less impressive than the ancient stonework. The purpose for destroying, dismantling, and covering up the Inca buildings was to erase the natives' sense of identity and force future generations to conform to a new way of life and a new religion. As stated earlier, Native American buildings were not just buildings. They tended to possess a cosmological, astronomical, and religious context. They were multi-purposed and held deep, resonating, esoteric meanings. By concealing this, they further suppressed and strangled the Inca identity conforming many natives by force to Christianity and a European way of life. For over 400 years, the speaking of the native language, Quechua, was forbidden or discriminated against. Only in the late 1900s did it become culturally acceptable for someone to actually embrace their native Inca heritage and language. And only by Inca people secretly teaching their children the native tongue did Inca culture survive colonialism for over 400 years. The Inca people, their religion, their language, and their architecture was made to last. In 1650, a massive earthquake struck Cusco, shaking all of the Spanish colonial buildings to the ground. But the Inca buildings were still standing, unfazed. 300 years later, in 1950, Cusco was struck by yet another massive earthquake, shaking the modern architecture to the ground and revealing that the ancient buildings beneath were still standing. After this, the Peruvian government declared that these buildings were national heritage sites that were never to be covered up again. I find ancient Peru and the Sacred Valley in particular absolutely fascinating. It's just such a beautiful place. The culture, the food, the environment, and the ancient history is just perfect. It's a wonderful, wonderful experience traveling and visiting with the native people of Peru and seeing their native heritage, the things that their ancestors achieved. It's absolutely fascinating. And diving into these lost chapters of ancient history is just so fulfilling. I'm Luke Caverns. If you'd like more videos on the history and mysteries of places all around the world, well, please like and subscribe for more.