Festival · Cusco, Peru · 24 June
Inti Raymi: Peru’s Festival of the Sun
Every 24 June, as the southern winter settles over the Andes, Cusco turns to face the sun. Inti Raymi, the Inca Festival of the Sun, fills the old imperial capital with processions and ceremony, and the gold that runs through it tells two stories at once: of a civilisation that valued the metal without ever pricing it, and of the conquest that turned it into money.
The sweat of the sun
The Inca built one of the largest states of the pre-modern world without coinage or markets priced in metal. Labour was owed to the state, goods moved through storehouses and obligations, and gold and silver had no role as currency. They were sacred materials. Gold was described as the sweat of Inti, the sun, and silver as the tears of the moon, and both belonged above all to the temples and to the Sapa Inca, who was regarded as the sun’s descendant.
Nowhere was that clearer than at Qorikancha, the Temple of the Sun in Cusco. Chroniclers described walls faced with hundreds of sheets of gold and a garden in which maize plants, llamas and their herders were modelled life-size in gold and silver. Inti Raymi, held at the June solstice when the sun stands lowest in the southern sky, was the most important ceremony in the Inca year, a rite to honour the sun and to ask for its return as the days began to lengthen.
The ransom and the melting
The Spanish arrived with a very different idea of what gold was for. In 1532 Francisco Pizarro captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca. Atahualpa offered to fill a room once with gold and twice with silver in exchange for his freedom, and over the following months objects poured in from across the empire, including much of the gold of Qorikancha. Historians estimate the ransom at roughly six tonnes of gold and twice that weight of silver. Almost all of it, including irreplaceable works of art, was melted into bars and divided among the conquerors and the Spanish Crown. Atahualpa was executed in July 1533 regardless.
It is one of the clearest turning points in the history of gold: the moment a body of sacred objects was converted, in a matter of weeks, into bullion. The flow of Andean gold and, above all, silver to Europe over the following century transformed Spain’s finances and the money supply of much of the world. The festival itself did not survive the change easily. In 1572 the viceroy Francisco de Toledo banned Inti Raymi as a pagan rite, and for nearly four centuries it lived on only in memory and in the colonial chronicles.
The festival today
In 1944 the Cusco writer Faustino Espinoza Navarro led a revival, reconstructing the ceremony from those chronicles, notably the account of the mestizo historian Garcilaso de la Vega. It has been staged every year since and is now one of the largest festivals in South America. The day begins at Qorikancha, where the Spanish built the church and convent of Santo Domingo on the Inca walls. A procession then moves through the city, with the actor playing the Sapa Inca carried on a litter in golden regalia, before the main ceremony at the fortress of Sacsayhuamán above Cusco. The prayers and speeches are delivered in Quechua.
The gold on show today is mostly theatrical, but the questions it raises are real. Peru remains one of the leading gold producers in the Americas, from large modern mines to informal workings in the Amazon basin whose environmental costs are well documented. The festival invites a comparison between two ways of valuing the same metal: as something held in reverence, kept out of circulation, and as something to be extracted, refined and exchanged. Most of gold’s history has involved both at once, and Inti Raymi is one of the few places where the contrast is staged in public each year.
A note on dates. The modern Inti Raymi is held in Cusco on 24 June each year, a few days after the June solstice. Figures for Atahualpa’s ransom come from the Spanish records of its division and vary somewhat between historians.
Related reading: Andean Pachamama Day: Gold Returned to the Earth · Akwasidae and the Golden Stool
Inti Raymi is held each year on 24 June. Find it, and the rest of the year’s occasions, on the Gold for All Seasons calendar.