Tipon temples and aqueducts Travel Video Guide

Tipon temples and aqueducts Travel Itinerary

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Both in setting and architectural design, Tipon ruins (daily 7am-5.30pm; entry by Cusco Tourist Ticket) is one of the most impressive Inca sites. Rarely visited, and with a guard who seems to be permanently on holiday, it's essentially open all the time and free. From Oropesa, the simplest way to reach the ruins is by backtracking down the main Cusco road some 2km to a signposted track. Follow this up through a small village, once based around the now crumbling and deserted hacienda Quispicanchi, and continue along the gully straight ahead. Once on the path above the village, it's about an hour's climb to the first ruins.

Well hidden in a natural shelf high above the Huatanay valley, the lower sector of the ruins is a stunning sight: a series of neat agricultural terraces, watered by stone-lined channels, all astonishingly preserved and many still in use. Imposing order on nature's "chaos", the superb stone terracing seems as much a symbol of the Incas' domination over a subservient labour pool as it does an attempt to increase crop yield. At the back of the lower ruins water flows from a stone-faced "mouth" around a spring - probably an aqueduct subterraneously diverted from above. The entire complex is designed around this spring, reached by a path from the last terrace. Another sector of the ruins contains a reservoir and temple block centred around a large exploded volcanic rock - presumably some kind of huaca. Although the stonework in the temple seems cruder than that of the agricultural terracing, its location is amazing. By contrast the construction of the reservoir is very fine, as it was originally built to hold nine hundred cubic metres of water which gradually dispersed along stone channels to the Inca "farm" directly below.

Coming off the back of the reservoir, a large tapering stone aqueduct crosses a small gully before continuing uphill, about thirty minutes' walk, to a vast zone of unexcavated terraces and dwellings. Beyond these, over the lip of the hill, you come to another level of the upper valley literally covered in Inca terracing, dwellings and large stone storehouses. Equivalent in size to the lower ruins, these are still used by locals who've built their own houses among the ruins. So impressive is the terracing at Tipon that some archeologists believe it was an Inca experimental agricultural centre, much like Moray,

as well as a citadel.

With no village or habitation in sight, and fresh running water, it's a breathtaking place to camp . There's a splendid stroll back down to the main road taking a path through the locals' huts in the upper sector over to the other side of the stream, and following it down the hillside opposite Tipon. This route offers an excellent perspective on the ruins, as well as vistas towards Cusco in the north and over the Huatanay/Vilcanota valleys to the south.

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