Inti Raymi

Inti Raymi is Cusco’s modern Festival of the Sun, held each June 24 near the southern winter solstice. It evokes an Inca ceremony associated with the sun, renewal, agriculture and the gathering of representatives from the four suyus. Colonial authorities suppressed Inca public ritual, and the current event should not be presented as an unchanged performance transmitted continuously from the fifteenth century.

Cusco intellectuals and artists reconstructed the festival in 1944 using colonial chronicles by writers including Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Guamán Poma. Faustino Espinoza Navarro wrote the initial Quechua script and portrayed the first modern Inca. The production developed into a major expression of Cusco identity and tourism, while scholarship notes that staging, state involvement and audience expectations have continued to reshape it.

The main sequence uses Qorikancha, the Plaza de Armas and Sacsayhuamán, with the Inca, royal entourage, delegations, music, dance and symbolic offerings. June 24 is also Cusco Day and can have regional arrangements, but Inti Raymi is not an additional nationwide paid holiday under Legislative Decree 713. Tickets, access, broadcast and ceremony times are determined annually by Cusco organisers and authorities.