Pisac I

Last Friday our teacher took us to Pisac, famous for being the first Inca agricultural establishment, and conveniently located less than an hour from Cusco (the bus there costs about 60 American cents).

The famous Andean andenerías, or agricultural terraces. On the lower terraces were cultivated less-cold-hardy varieties of potatoes, while on the upper levels thrived more-cold-resisant potatoes and some varieties of maize. It still amazes me how the ancient Andean people chose to live way up here in the mountains and adapted wonderfully to their high-altitude, steep-sloped home.



These structures, they say, were part of the residential area of Pisac, which at its height was home to probably about 4000 people.






I like stairs. My calves, however, seemed to disagree after having walked down several hundred of them, far steeper than these, back to Pisac pueblo. In the lower left corner, there is a shadow trying to hide a particularly large rock that was simply sculpted to fit the staircase, rather than cut it up into individual steps. That's Inca engineering, my friends.














A view of part of the site with the valley below. That river there, whose name I can't remember, it supposedly mirrors the Milky Way galaxy, or at least it did in the pre-columbian days.