Welcome to Palacio del Inka, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Cusco

Foundation of the city with the title of "The Very Noble and Great City of Cusco." The Plaza Mayor (Main Square) was chosen, the site of the church was determined and, among the forty Spaniards who decided to settle as neighbors, the distribution of lots, lands and Indians was made. Some versions indicate that the first Spanish owner of the property on which Amarucancha lay was Francisco Pizarro’s brother, Gonzalo Pizarro.

According to data from the first chroniclers, such as Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, Spanish soldier and secretary of Francisco Pizarro, by 1543 more than 100,000 houses could be found in the city. Juan de Salas y Valdés, Spanish conqueror who was mayor of Cusco between 1571 and 1572, and his wife, Usenda de Bazán, were the first to build on the Inca site and the original owners of the house, they used the original Inca wall as the basis for the first floor.

In its main façade (which today faces San Agustín Street), Salas y Valdés carved four busts on the lintel of the portal - two on each side of a central shield, the shield of the Salas de Asturias - to perpetuate the presence of his family in that house and in the city: they represent him, his wife, his eldest son Fernando de Valdés Bazán and his daughter-in-law, Leonor de Tordoya y Palomino. The carved busts, of Renaissance characteristics, were made during the first years of the 17th century and the house remained as family property for several generations.

La Casona de los Cuatro Bustos is one of the most famous residences in Viceroyalty Peru. Its arches and patios of Hispanic style, and the first colonial pillars made by Inca hands have overcome the passage of time. In the mid-twentieth century the building was recovered by the government and was the headquarters of the Viceroyalty Museum for a couple of decades, until it moved to the Garcilaso de la Vega House. Since 1972 the property is part of the Monumental Zone of Cusco, declared a Historic Monument of Peru. Also, in 1983 it was included in the central area designated by UNESCO as Cultural Heritage of Humanity. At present, its architecture represents part of the treasures that the hotel keeps.

Strange and beautiful, it is the only piece of the wall that is not of granite, but of green diorite, a material that can be found in key points such as San Blas, Machu Picchu and the Sacsayhuaman hillsides.The Incas reserved it for the most important and sacred places, because they believed in their connecting energy between the material world and the spiritual world.

It fed on the presence of Spanish teachers arriving to America; of the baroque and naturalism from Seville, as well as the collections of Spanish and Flemish paintings that arrived with the Europeans. It implied a very deep change in the Andean imaginary and a schism in the pictorial language of the Inca empire.

The Cusco school was a pioneer, among other things, in the arquebusier angel representation. The arquebus was a weapon that was associated with Andean deities such as thunder, for example. The use of gold and the lack of interest in perspective were symbolic in its aesthetic proposal.

The movement success was such that in the second third of the 18th century the workshops produced religious works in series. Its discussion reached the south of the continent (La Plata and Santiago de Chile) and reached Mexico.

The central table gathers and represents the main artistic aspects of the last centuries and the hotel great collection.

Observe the detail of the wood carving and the gold leaf of very old folk art pieces; tour the Hispanic architecture and its encounter with the amazing Inca constructions; and discover a contemporary creation that keeps alive the artistic and artisanal tradition of the city.