Legend has it that Cusco was founded by the sons of the Sun on the spot indicated to them by this god. The city that was built was opulent and marvelous, of gold and stone. It is not by chance that the first Europeans to arrive there were enormously impressed. One of them, Pedro Sanchez, who was Francisco Pizarro's secretary, wrote: "The city of Cusco, which is the principal city of those that serve as a home for the gentleman, is so large, so beautiful and has so many buildings, that it should be seen in Spain". Another chronicler, Pedro Cieza de Leon, added that Cusco was the richest city to be found in the Indies and that some of the buildings were golden and others were decorated with the sheets of gold.

The truth is that the origin of Cusco was a humble as that of the majority of cities. Although the valley of Cusco has signs of being populated from approximately one thousand years before Christ, the city of the Incas began to grow as the Incas began to dominate the neighboring of the new city "was a small house of stone covered by straw" that had been built by the first Inca Manco Capac, and they gave it the name of Coricancha which means surrounded by gold.

Cusco's legendary grandeur is owed mainly to Pachacutec, the real builder of the Inca Empire. According to the majority of writers, he was the governor who decided to rebuild the city. With this in mind, he relocated the population in peripherical districts and flattened their "low houses that were badly built and devoid of art", according to Juan Diez de Betanzos. The Inca architect used clay models to plan the new city whose principal characteristic lays in the consolidation of an urban sector in the form of a resting puma an agricultural one with lots of terraces and irrigation canals. The two rivers that crossed the puma city, the Saphy and the Tullumayo, were also channeled with quarried stone. The construction work of temples, palaces, stores, streets and squares must have appeared colossal and among these were the new Coricancha or Temple to the Sun and Sacsayhuaman, a cyclopean building intended to symbolize the head of the Puma that was raised on the hill that dominates the city from the north.

The uniqueness of the Inca architecture is closely related to the quality of the finish on the stone and the perfect assembly of one black with another. In a culture that did not know iron, this was possible thanks to the extraordinary familiarity with the material and the skillful employment of simple tools made from hard stones like quartz and others. Visually Cusco stood out for the sobriety of its walls and their characteristic talus made that made them more resistant to the frequent earth tremors known in the zone. The dominating elements of the city must be Sacsayhuaman, Coricancha and the Sunturhuasi, a circular tower of three or four stories that apparently rose in the main square. This occupied what is currently the Main Square and Regocijo (Diversion) Square and fulfilled an important function of integrating the urban sector of the city with its important predominance of farmed terraces.

THE JEWEL OF THE COLONY
The Spanish founded Cusco on March 23, 1534 and some months later, in October the land was distributed giving rise to the radical transformations experienced by the city. The Spanish blocks were formed by grouping one or more Inca courts that were rectangular plots surrounded by stone walls that constituted pattern for grouping the houses together. Churches and convents were built on top of the Inca temples or ruins, such as Santo Domingo over Coricancha and Santa Catalina over the House of the Sun Virgins or "Acllahuasi". The agricultural sector of the city, that extended from the right bank of the River Saphy, was also divided into plots and was occupied by mansions that sometimes had walls built with a mixed technique, Inca in the laying of the stone and Spanish in the verticality achieved, thanks to the use of the plumb bob.

For two centuries Cusco grew in this way to become a city that is, in the words of Jose Maria Arguedas, "an irrefutable and permanent sample of the creative power of the two races on which the actual population of Peru is founded". In effect, it is a city that combines two architectures of a special quality, the Inca and the Spanish.

The remains of Inca Cusco can be traced to the open spaced such as the Main Square and that of the Municipality. Large and Small Limacpampa as well as the small Santo Domingo square and the Loreto, Ahuacpinta, San Augustin, Pumacurco, Ladrillo, Cabracancha and Siete Culebras (Seven Snakes) streets, that still conserve their original width. Even more outstanding are the Inca walls that form the first floor of many colonial mansions and architectural elements such as vaults, double jambs portals and trapezoid windows. For several centuries, Cusco displayed the magnificent Inca channeling of the Saphy and Tullumayo river that were covered only recently during the first half of the twentieth century.

On the other hand, the main statements of colonial period architecture are the religious buildings, but the civil architecture that provide them with a context -in other words small palaces and mansions -does not compare unfavorably in terms of quality. Three emblematical works of Cusco architectural art, the Cathedral, the Church of the Company of Jesus and the Convent of the Grace permit a close examination of the importance of colonial Cusco. In reference to the first of these, curiously there is no consensus of opinion among the experts as to which architectural style it belongs to. Those who consider that these magnificent building summarizes the history of the first century of the colonial architecture are probably correct. The interior of the Cathedral is characterized by its colossal proportions and the austere simplicity of the best examples of Inca architecture. The Cathedral undoubtedly would not be what it is, were it not for the beauty of the Inca andesite, with its reddish reflections, used as the construction material. It is a fact that there are renowned specialists who consider this church to be the most admirable in the western hemisphere.

The Church of the Company of Jesus and the Convent of the Grace are the best expressions of Cusco baroque, a style that takes the architecture of the city to its highest. In the case of the former, its elegant portal, decorated with columns, pilasters, vaults, escutcheons and cornices, is where it best express the style mentioned although no less important for the elegant style of the whole are the beauty and appropriate proportion of the composition, which is twice as high as it is wide, and the pleasing solution found for the towers, wit its oxeyes and pilasters that adorn it.

It has been stated justifiably that, in this time, the Company of Jesus Church produced a revolution in Cusco architectural art, pointing to a direction that was followed by other buildings. The Convent of Grace owes its fame to the convent's main cloister, a work of great originality and beauty because of the contrast between the almost rustic walls and the opulent decoration of the columns. It is understandable why this cloister is considered the best in all the Spanish speaking America.