Cusco, where a convent stands on Inca temple walls

UNESCO inscribed the City of Cuzco, as it spells the name, in 1983. The record describes a city at 3,400 m in an Andean valley, where the Inca plan survives in walls of cut granite or andesite and straight streets running between them. After the 16th-century conquest the Spaniards kept that basic structure and built temples, monasteries and manor houses over the Inca city, mostly in a Baroque style with local adaptations. The inscribed property covers 142.48 ha.[1]

Cusco’s municipality describes the Qorikancha as an Inca precinct enclosed by a perimeter wall, with rooms devoted to the sun, moon, stars and lightning. Citing the architect Graziano Gasparini, it says the walls were stone only up to the height seen today, with adobe above and thatched roofs. The Dominican order later held the site and at first adapted Inca structures; the report notes that sources disagree on how the land reached the Dominicans and on when the formal convent was built. The regional culture directorate records the temple and convent of Santo Domingo as a national monument declared on 28 December 1972.[2][3]

The earthquake of 21 May 1950 brought down parts of the Dominican temple and convent. The restoration that began six years later favoured the Inca structures. The municipal report, citing Gasparini, calls it controversial and says it included work to complete missing parts of the monument, which it now describes as doubtful. A 1990 resolution declared expropriation of the Qorikancha area necessary; from 1992 buildings on an area of 4,220 m² were demolished, and excavation recorded wall sections, one of them 100 m long, as well as evidence that the temple’s front had been terraced.[2]