This video shows the primary structures of Choquequirao Archaeological Park’s main plaza. The ruins were once an Inca city that was mysteriously abandoned. Click the icon in the lower righthand corner of the player to expand the video.
As the Spanish tightened their grip on Peru in the 16th century, Manco Inca and the remnants of his empire defied colonialism from the fortresses of Vilcabamba.
Near the end of my first trip to Cusco in September 2022, I slowly browsed the art gallery at Qorikancha, the former Inca capitol building that was famously plated in gold. Several of the pieces on display depicted the period during and after Spanish conquest of the Andean region in the 1530s. One painting, an oil on canvas entitled Requeirmiento, stopped me for a few minutes.
Spanish for a “demanded requirement,” the scene in the frame shows an empire on its knees. As a supplicant Atahualpa, the emperor of the Inca, was cornered by conquistador Francisco Pizarro, native citizens of Cusco seemingly trembled in fear at the sight of their foreign invaders.
Catholic clergy traveling with Pizarro’s expedition were painted in the foreground, forcefully presenting their crucifixes and Bibles as if they were supernatural weapons against the Inca’s pagan idolatry. The mood of the art was undoubtedly idealized from the Church’s perspective, but it wasn’t based in fiction. Atahualpa spent time in captivity before being strangled to death by the Spanish in 1533. Pizarro, the emperor’s captor and conquerer of Cusco, was the man credited with founding the Peruvian capital of Lima.
Even the painting’s title was a reference to colonial history: Written in 1513 by the Spanish Crown, El Requiermiento was mandated to be read to native peoples of the “New World” by expeditionary forces upon first encounter. The document gave a hellish ultimatum: “Barbarous nations” like the Inca could either submit to their “subduers” or prepare to be mercilessly attacked.
Although many Inca surrendered (and were promptly either enslaved or executed) before the superior Spanish war machine during Pizarro’s invasion of the Cusco area, the painting doesn’t portray the others who chose to fight on. As the empire crumbled over the ensuing years, its remaining bands of resistance receded into one of the most formidable mountain terrains on Earth – Vilcabamba, the Inca’s “sacred plain.”
Five centuries afterward, their legacy of defiance reverberates into the present day.
The Siege of Cuzco
Several months later in June 2023, I stood at the remote overlook of Capuliyoc, a mountain outpost that’s around 100 miles (160 kms) west of Cusco. My gaze plunged thousands of feet below as I traced a winding trail that led into a yawning canyon. The vista is the first landmark on the trek to the Inca ruins of Choquequirao; it’s also near the former boundary of the Neo-Inca region of Vilcabamba.
Meaning “cradle of gold” in the Quechua language, Choquequirao was recently named as one of the world’s premier adventure destinations by travel authorities National Geographic and Lonely Planet. The former metropolis was one of Vilcabamba’s four major population centers along with Vitcos, the city of Vilcabamba, and world-famous Machu Picchu.
The major difference between Choquequirao and its more well-known sister city to the northeast is its retained mystique: While Machu Picchu receives between 3,000-4,000 visitors per day, Choquequirao, which isn’t even half excavated, won’t near 10,000 annually. The reason, quite simply, is infrastructure, or the lack thereof; the narrow, incredibly steep trail I was staring down at Capuliyoc is the only way in and out. In terms of access, it’s not much different than it was in 1536, when the rebel leader Manco Inca Yupanqui laid siege to his former capital.
Not long after the capture of Atahualpa, Manco Inca was installed by the Spanish as a veritable puppet emperor. His allegiance to the Europeans was short-lived, and he attempted to regain control of former imperial territories to the north of Cusco and along the Peruvian coast. Manco Inca’s gambit failed, but he still had one great offensive left in him.
Four years after Pizarro conquered Cuzco, as it was spelled by the Quechua-speaking peoples that comprised the empire, the Spanish-controlled city was surrounded by a vast army. The precise number is unknown, but the book The Inca: Lost Civilizations by University of Buenos Aires researcher Kevin Lane estimates the fighting force was somewhere between 100,000-200,000 warriors.
Perched atop the city at the citadel of Sacsayhuamán, Manco Inca’s siege lasted for 10 long months.* The Spanish were eventually able to cut off supply routes to his position, and they chased him north to the Sacred Valley stronghold of Ollantaytambo.
Undaunted, Manco Inca’s forces beat back the attack and launched a counteroffensive on Cuzco. It was ultimately repelled, marking the true end of the Inca Empire.
On the run, he and his troops were left with one option: flee west to the high-altitude fortresses of Vilcabamba.
* Sacsayhuamán, which means “the place where the hawk is satisfied” in Quechua, is one of present-day Cusco’s most popular tourist attractions.
Guerrillas of the Cloud Forests
Several hours after departing the overlook at Capuliyoc, I arrived at the bottom of the canyon. The mighty Apurímac River rushed under me as I crossed the Rosalinas Bridge. Hundreds of feet above to the north, I saw a dust cloud and the faint outline of pack animals ambling down the towering mountain. Behind them were two local herders, both of whom were almost certainly descendants of the Inca.
Along with its intrepid trail system, mysterious ruins, and stunning mountain environment, Choquequirao is considered one of the planet’s greatest adventures because of the cultural experience: For a few unforgettable days, you are living off the grid with the lineage of an empire – eating their food, sleeping in their villages, and laboring along their age-old footpaths.
While most of Choquequirao’s history has been lost to time, Manco Inca most assuredly frequented the area after his failed siege of Cusco. He crossed into Vilcabamba at the nearby modern-day settlement of Chaullay, destroying the Chuquichaca Bridge to slow down his Spanish pursuers.
The delay tactic, however, only bought him a few days. As the book Voices of Vilcabamba describes, a military unit led by Rodrigo Ordóñez and Rui Díaz rebuilt the bridge and followed the road a short distance to Vitcos.* By the time they arrived, Manco Inca had disappeared into the dense cloud forests that are copious in the region.
It wasn’t long until the former emperor turned rebel leader began launching raids across the Apurímac River. They were so frequent and damaging that the Spanish were forced to construct a new town, the present-day city of Ayacucho, along the trade route linking Cusco to Lima.
Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco’s half-brother, led a second Spanish raid into Vilcabamba in 1539. Following the same route as Ordóñez and Díaz, he made it to Vitcos only to find that Manco Inca had once again slipped into the wilderness. Instead of turning back, however, Pizarro chose to tread deeper into the region.
The Spanish raiders eventually caught up to the rebel band at the community of Huayna Pucará. Manco Inca’s forces, however, fought off the ensuing attack, killing several soldiers and Indigenous allies before vanishing into the mountains.
The battle was won, but, as fate would have it, Huayna Pucará would later be a pivotal setting during the collapse of Vilcabamba and subsequent apprehension of Manco Inca’s most famous son.
* The book Voices of Vilcabamba was written by University of Illinois at Chicago’s Professor of Anthropology Brian S. Bauer and PhD candidates Madeleine Halac-Higashimori and Gabriel E. Cantarutti.
Fall of the Neo-Inca State
After spending my first night on the trail in the small Quechua town of Marampata, I made it to the ruins of Choquequirao the following morning. Shedding my pack at the main plaza, I stretched my tired legs while swiveling my perspective intermittently to fully appreciate the beautiful mountain panorama that envelopes the stone remnants of the former city.
No one really knows when or why the sprawling city was abandoned, but it likely occurred sometime around the capture and execution of Manco Inca’s son Túpac Amaru in 1572. His death officially marked the fall of Vilcabamba and the extinction of organized Inca resistance against colonialism.
Before it perished, there were periods of uneasy peace with the Spanish, ones that were largely afforded by distraction. Following Gonzalo Pizarro’s raid, the colonizers began to experience dissension within their ranks. As University of Bristol Reader in History Dr. Fernando Cervantes describes in his book Conquistadores, Francisco Pizarro was assassinated in Lima in 1541 by supporters of his late rival Diego de Almagro. A few years later, Gonzalo, who had been named governor of Ecuador’s modern-day capital of Quito, was executed in Cusco after leading a revolutionary effort against the Spanish in Peru.
Parade participants dance their way around the perimeter of Cusco’s Plaza de Armas during the 2023 Inti Raymi festival. The annual event was an Inca tradition. Click the icon in the lower righthand corner of the player to expand the video.
During this time of upheaval, Manco Inca granted asylum to Spanish fugitives who had attempted to overthrow Cusco’s government. The act of goodwill would prove to be his end; the Spaniards brutally murdered him in the plaza of Vitcos. His eldest son Sayri Tupac took over leadership of the region until his own death in 1560.
Titu Cusi Yupanqui, another of Manco Inca’s sons, was the next ruler in line; he agreed to what was supposed to have been the surrender of Neo-Inca resistance when he signed the 1566 Treaty of Acobamba. On paper, Titu Cusi vowed he would emerge from his mountain hideout and concede Vilcabamba to Spanish rule. However, he never followed through on his promise before his death in 1570.
Vilcabamba’s throne changed hands for a final time with the ascension of Manco Inca’s last living son, Túpac Amaru. After he assumed the title Sapa Inca, the Quechua term for their kingdom’s monarch, communication between Vilcabamba and Cusco suddenly ceased. Curious about the development, Francisco de Toledo, the new Spanish viceroy of Cusco, dispatched envoys to Vilcabamba, but they were denied entry at the Apurímac River.
Toledo, determined to make inroads with the Neo-Inca state, sent Atilano de Anaya across the Urubamba River. Having spent time there previously, Anaya was familiar with Vilcabamba. The Inca, however, wasted no time in killing him.
Anaya’s death made Toledo furious. He ordered an invasion of Vilcabamba, and a contingent of Spanish troops and Indigenous confederates led by Martín Hurtado de Arbieto stormed across the Neo-Inca border. After conquering Vitcos, they set their sights on Vilcabamba, the town that held the last pocket of significant resistance.
During their march, Arbieto’s forces were nearly ambushed at Huayna Pucará, the same place that Manco Inca repelled the Spanish during Gonzalo Pizarro’s raid. This time, though, Arbieto was tipped off to the previous attack and managed to thwart its reoccurrence.
From there, the end came swiftly for the freedom fighters: Once Arbieto arrived, Vilcabamba had already been torched by the fleeing rebels. With their last stronghold up in flames, they scattered to different parts of the region. The Spanish hunted them down one by one, eventually capturing Túpac Amaru and his pregnant wife in a nearby jungle.
Manco Inca’s youngest son was taken to Cusco and beheaded at the city’s central square, the present-day Plaza de Armas.
The Legacy of Vilcabamba
In Andean mythology, Amaru was a water serpent that embodied the first female being. Her existence brought about human reproduction and the eventual rise of the estimated 12 million natives that comprised the Inca Empire. Although short-lived, the imperial footprint of the Inca was staggeringly vast; it reached north to present-day southern Colombia near the Darien Gap and south to the lower region of Chile, almost encompassing the entire Pacific coast of South America.*
Relative to reproducing uprisings, Túpac Amaru was much like the supernatural snake deity he was named after; the symbolism of his fight to the death against colonialism directly inspired another Quechua rebellion two centuries later. It also indirectly contributed to a musical and cultural revolution in the modern West.
In 1780, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, an Indigenous chief of a region south of Cusco, set off the the largest revolt in colonial Spanish-American history when he executed administrator Antonio Arriaga for cruelty. Condorcanqui was a descendant of Túpac Amaru, and he changed his name to Túpac Amaru II in his ancestor’s honor.
This video shows the interior and window view of the cabins at Choquequirao Wasi, a serviced accommodation at the Andean outpost of Capuliyoc, Peru. Click the icon in the lower righthand corner of the player to expand the video.
He and his wife Micaela Bastidas became the faces of the rebellion that swept across parts of Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. According to the University of California-Berkeley, up to 100,000 people died before the Spanish ended the insurgency in 1783 by issuing a blanket pardon. Túpac Amaru II, however, was captured and executed during the height of the unrest in 1781. He was beheaded at Cusco’s modern-day Plaza de Armas, the exact fate of the original Túpac Amaru of Vilcabamba.
Flash-forward another two centuries to 1971 in the Brooklyn borough of New York, NY. Activist Afeni Shakur, a member of the Black Panther Party, gave birth to a boy named Lesane Crooks. A year later, she was stirred by the narrative of the 18th-century Quechua revolt against Spanish colonialism and decided to change her son’s name to Tupac Amaru Shakur.
Shakur, or more commonly known by his stage name 2pac, grew up to become one of the most consequential cultural figures of the modern era. He wasn’t just a transcendent talent in the popular gangsta rap musical genre of the 1990s; 2pac was also a leading civil rights activist until his untimely death in 1996.
While the three iterations of Túpac Amaru are Vilcabamba’s most significant contribution to history, there’s more to be said for the memory of the region than the valiance of its final Sapa Inca. As Manco Inca fled west from Cusco in 1537 to isolated fortresses like Choquequirao, he was surely filled with both emptiness and dread. It was only a matter of time before the Spanish prevailed; a leader of his magnitude would have understood that.
Although Manco Inca and his people weren’t read El Requiermiento, they were faced with the same dreadful choice as Atahualpa and the citizens of Cusco, Aztec emperor Montezuma and the denizens of central Mexico’s Tenochtitlan, and every other native culture of the Americas that stood in the way of European colonialism: surrender your identity or risk oblivion.
Summoning all their courage, Vilcabamba chose the latter. And that is the legacy of the Inca’s last stand.
* At the time of Spanish conquest, the Inca Empire was the largest on Earth. However, much like central Mexico’s Aztec Triple Alliance from the same era, it didn’t last long: Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui first began aggressively expanding the Inca’s domain around 1438, less than a century before Francisco Pizarro toppled Cuzco.
Related Content
– Click to read my travel guide “How to Hike to Choquequirao” for tips on reaching the remote Inca ruins.
– Click to view my high-resolution photo collection from the Choquequirao trail.
– Click to browse my travel guides for nearby Cusco, Peru.