Underground Tunnels Discovered in Cusco, Reviving Inca Legends

Sonja Anderson
Daily Correspondent

January 21, 2025



Spanish settlers knocked down all but the foundations of the Temple of the Sun, then built a church atop the Inca walls. Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commonsreviving-inca-legends/


It’s long been rumored that a network of old, underground tunnels lies beneath Cusco, Peru, the capital of the ancient Incan empire. Now, thanks to archival texts and ground-penetrating radar, researchers say they’ve confirmed the tunnels’ existence.

Archaeologists Jorge Calero Flores and Mildred Fernández Palomino, leaders of the research project, recently announced their findings at a press conference, according to a translated Facebook post by the Association of Archaeologists of Peru. Flores said the team found an underground passage connecting two of Cusco’s key Inca monuments: the Temple of the Sun—which conquistadors ruined and covered with a Catholic church in the 16th century—and the Sacsayhuamán fortress, a 15th-century Inca monument of stone walls more than a mile away.

The Inca dominated Peru’s Andes Mountains and jungles for centuries. They established their capital of Cusco in the 12th century, then conquered swaths of land between the early 15th and 16th centuries, after which the empire controlled some 12 million people. It was during this century of expansion that the Inca built Machu Picchu, the famed “lost city” perched on a mountaintop 50 miles from Cusco. In the mid- to late-16th century, the Inca empire—weakened by internal strife—fell to the rule of invading Spanish colonizers.

The Inca left no written records of their underground constructions in Cusco, but Spaniards did. A 1594 text by an anonymous Spanish Jesuit describes a tunnel that begins at the Temple of the Sun, runs beneath the bishop housing behind Cusco Cathedral and ends at Sacsayhuamán, reports IFL Science’s Benjamin Taub. Another text, written by Jesuit chronicler Juan Anello de Oliva, alludes to several tunnels beneath Cusco—accessible from a cave in the Sacsayhuamán fortress—and says construction workers took care to avoid the tunnels during work, per Popular Mechanics’ Tim Newcomb. As Flores said at the press conference, these records gave his team an idea of where to look.



An illustration shows the tunnel's location near the fortress. Association of Archaeologists of Peru

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-have-found-an-inca-tunnel-beneath-the-Peruvian-city-of-cusco-180985872/