Peru’s Extraordinary Roads

The main road of the ancient Peruvians was one of the greatest engineering feats in the Americas. Its dauntingly steep, seemingly endless terraced-stone expanse is still there more than 1000 years later. The stepped, wide-granite thoroughfare spills down, and down, and down, from the Peruvian Andes into the flat valley of Cajamarca.

Called by the Inca who inherited it from previous generations of earlier cultures, “the Capac Ñan,” which means “main road” or “royal road,” is a network of over 3,000 miles that still exists in remarkably durable portions across six countries of South America. “First of all,” Karen Stothert, an archaeologist from the University of Texas at San Antonio, who began walking these roads in 1967, states, “We call them Inca roads, but many of us know it was built before the Inca.”

For at least 3,000 years, other cultures, including the Moche and the Nazca, forged trails that connected to the larger world, and engaged in long-range trade for herbal medicine, gold and other goods. When the Inca conquered the Andes in the 15th century, they put a stop to that “somewhat egalitarian society,” Stothert says, “brutally subduing hundreds of nations. For many ordinary people, the Inca Road then meant subjugation and impoverishment.”

With suspension bridges and ramrod-straight roads laid out by ancient surveyors, the road functions as a kind of map of Inca ambitions, and before that, of the ancient cultures who dominated the Andes of Peru and Ecuador. Sothoert has conducted seminal research on the road system, especially in Ecuador and Peru, documenting and mapping bridges, walls, tunnels and drainage systems on the eastern slopes of the Andes. “You are talking about thousands of miles in some of the most rugged topography in the world,” she stated. “The road climbs 5,000 feet straight up mountains. Sometimes it is built on a stone ledge, just wide enough for a llama. If you bump your backpack, it can bump you right off the cliff, 2,000 to 3,000 feet down.”

It was referred to in 1548 as the Grandest Road in the World, by Pedro Cieza de Leon, a conquistador and chronicler of Peru, who is primarily known for his history and description of Peru. Cieza, as a young soldier, came to Andean Peru to write down the "wonderful things of these Indies.” As he records in his record regarding the stone-paved highway he had followed for so many miles. The 28-year old conquistador, recently turned chronicler, who had been in the Andean area since the age of 16, wrote: “Accordingly the Inca constructed the grandest road that there is in the world as well as the longest, for it extends from Cuzco to Quito and was connected from Cuzco to Chile a  distance of 800 leagues [2,080 miles]. There are retaining walls with roads built into the snowy heights with steps and resting places, and along its entire length swept cleanly and cleared of debris with post stations and storehouses and Temples of the Sun at appointed intervals along its length”” (Pedro Cieza de Leon, The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de León, 1532-50 AD (Contained in the First Part of His Chronicle of Peru), (Translated by Clements R. Markham), Hakluyt Society, London, 1883. (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2010) See also The Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru).

Cieza was born to a family of Jewish conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism in the 14^th and 15^th Centuries)  In the nearly five hundred years since the young traveler wrote much of this grandeur, it has been laid waste by the insults of time;  much is in ruins, many of the superbly made halting-places of the  road reduced to formless mounds. Here and there, during the inter-Highway of the Sun, the explorers and archaeologists have wandered over the empty spaces of Peru and painstakingly pushed away the de-  bris of time to ferret out some of the clues with which to reconstruct an empire. However, between what is known and what is not known lies an immense interval, and between what we know of the ancient cities along the road and what we do not know is a great gap.

Cieza's works, though historical, narrate the events of the Spanish conquest of Peru and the civil wars among the Spaniards that followed, much of their importance lies in his detailed descriptions of geography, ethnography, flora and fauna. He was the first European to describe some native Peruvian animal species and vegetables. Because of his works, the gaps between what we know and don’t know has narrowed somewhat.

According to Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, an American explorer, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and travel writer who journeyed in South America between 1940 and 1965, published a large number of widely acclaimed books about the ancient people of the Inca, Maya, and Aztec, who he spent two years traveling among and gathering information about their ancient societies. In the early 1950s, Hagen went for a two-year exploration of Peru’s ancient roads and found the only surviving suspension bridge of this trail.

Hagen stated: “We know only that the thread which bound the widely separated communities was the Road, that ubiquitous overwhelming Road, which Cieza de Leon described as the “grandest and longest in the world.” 

This ancient road can be followed from end to end, with some sections not only still standing, but many in excellent condition. In fact, many of these ancient roads are still used by the indigenous Peruvians. In fact, these ancient Peruvian roads, though attributed to the Inca, predate them by more than a thousand years. They not only aided ancient societies to carry out their movements but also their trade and distant travels. However, the early conquistadors, knowing of no other empire but the Inca in the land when they arrived and later subdue and displace, attributed the roads to the Inca, who without doubt used the roads in building their empire, and also later enabled the Spanish to conquer them. These roads were so expertly built, they are still useable today.

The early Peruvians built a road system which bound together all the discordant elements of their land the, such as the desert, the mountains, the forests and jungles, including steep hills and broad cliffs, yet was, in many respects, superior to any European road  network. “Nothing in Christendom equals these wonderful roads in Peru,” said the literate conquistador, Cieza de Leon. “This great road from Quito to Cuzco is as much used as the road from Seville to Triana  and I cannot say more ...”  As Hagen state: “During my many years of exploration through South America I had heard much about and had seen fragments of these fabulous royal roads. Now at long last I was determined to seek the reality of these ancient stone arteries and, wherever they might  lead through jungles, across deserts, over towering mountains  to follow from the starting point to the end this great highway system of roads which for centuries bound the Inca empire together and which, like the Persian highways, caused the  downfall of a great and ancient civilization.”

Hagen went on to mention “The Grandest Road in the World,” and then told the story of the two women and four men who formed the Expedition to see and study the roads in the winter of 1952, and to “seek out the remains of the most useful and stupendous works ever executed by man."  

That these roads rivaled or surpassed any other at the time, caused the conquistador writers to marvel at its engineering, especially as it crossed tall mountains, deserts, canyons and vast plains. While other roads were built anciently, these early Peruvians cut tunnels through solid rock mountains, bridged deep canyons with ingenious rope bridges, and engineered straight roads across flat areas as straight as an arrow. These roads have lasted for 2,000 years and many are still extant, rivaling any in all the world, including the Roman roads.