Cusco is the result of successive periods of imperial conquest. Nestled in the heart of the Andes, Cusco was the political and religious capital of the Incas, the hub of the greatest empire ever seen in the Americas and a place of pilgrimage for all those who worshipped the sun god, Inti. With the arrival of the Spanish in 1532, Cusco's temples and palaces became the foundations for magnificent neo-Baroque churches, and above its narrow streets appeared the wooden balconies of red-roofed colonial houses.
Cusco’s landscape is one of dramatic contrasts, where high mountain ranges combine with barren plains, rolling hills, deep valleys and lowland tropical forest, where Peru's finest natural reserves and among the most biodiverse regions on Earth.
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