Cusco Region Culture & Language

Cusco’s culture is a layering of Inca, colonial and living Quechua practice, and all three are visible on the same street.

The stonework

Inca masons shaped andesite and limestone blocks to fit without mortar in irregular polygonal joints, working the surfaces until a knife blade will not enter. The famous twelve-angled stone on Hatun Rumiyoc is one example among thousands. The technique is partly seismic engineering — the blocks settle and reseat during earthquakes rather than cracking, which is why the walls outlast everything built on them.

The Cusco school

A colonial painting tradition in which indigenous and mestizo artists worked within European religious subjects while introducing their own conventions: flat gold-leaf brocading over the paint, local flora, Andean dress on saints, and a famous Last Supper in the cathedral with roast guinea pig on the table.

Weaving

Andean textile is a technical tradition of great sophistication, with communities identifiable by pattern and the designs carrying meaning. Natural dyeing with cochineal, indigo and plants has been revived by cooperatives around Chinchero.

Dance

Highland fiestas are carried by masked dance troupes, each with its own costume and satirical character — the saqra devils, the qhapaq negro, the majeno muleteer — rehearsed for months by neighbourhood associations. The dances at Paucartambo’s Virgen del Carmen festival in July are the most elaborate, and the whole tradition is an unbroken commentary on colonial society rather than a folkloric revival.

Music

Panpipes, the quena flute and the charango, a small lute originally strung over an armadillo shell, with a repertoire of huayno dance music still played at village fiestas rather than only for visitors.

Spanish is the working language and is essential outside the tourist core.

Quechua is co-official and widely spoken in the countryside and by many in Cusco, particularly older people and those from the highland communities. Using a word or two is genuinely well received, in a way that reflects how the language has historically been treated.

English is common in Cusco’s hotels, agencies and restaurants and among guides, and thins immediately beyond them.

Useful Quechua: allillanchu for hello or how are you, sulpayki for thank you, and haykataq for how much.

Useful Spanish: buenos dias, cuanto cuesta, la cuenta por favor, and soroche, the local word for altitude sickness.