Inti Raymi (festival of the sun)

Garcilaso de la Vega, son of an Inca noblewoman and a Spanish captain, wrote in 1609 that it was the most solemn of the four festivals the Inca kings held at Cusco: Yntip Raymi, “the Solemn Feast of the Sun”, at the June solstice. The king himself opened it as high priest. Lords came from the provinces in the dress of the creatures they claimed descent from, some wrapped in lion skins with the heads over their own, others with the great black and white wings of the condor, and brought paintings of their deeds. For three days beforehand people ate only a little unripe maize and no fire was lit in the city, and on the last night the women of the Sun made great quantities of maize cakes for the feast. Cieza de León describes a second great feast at Cusco, the Hatun Raymi at the end of August after the harvest.

Spanish rule ended it. La República writes that the viceroy Francisco de Toledo banned the festival in the sixteenth century along with other Indigenous religious practices. In 1944 a group of Cusco intellectuals led by Humberto Vidal Unda revived it, building the ceremony from Garcilaso’s account, and it has been staged every year since.