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The Sacred Valley as a Zone of Productivity, Privilege and Power

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Spell of the Urubamba

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Abstract

The Urubamba mid-section, commonly now known as the Sacred Valley, has flat land on the valley floor, temperate climate, abundant irrigation water and scenic attributes. Five Inca kings acquired parts of the Sacred Valley as their own reserve and several of them ordered the construction of earthworks that materially enhanced resource use. For at least a millennium the agricultural mainstay has been flour maize, adapted to moderate temperatures and an unusually long growing season. After the Conquest, Spaniards appropriated the land and labor of this privileged section of the Urubamba. In the twentieth century, haciendas cultivated a large-kernelled, white flour corn that expanded after the breakup of the estate system. Decreasing water supply brought on by global warming and changing transportation adjustments favor crops with less water demands. Overarching the future, however, is land speculation that predicts a shift to tourist-oriented land use. Pollution of the Urubamba River, generalization of alien vegetation and settlement sprawl on rich farm land are Sacred Valley issues needing resolution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The expression “valle de Yucay” had both topographic and political meanings in the late colonial period when it was a corregimiento with 24 repartimientos. That duality of reference explains why Yucay was discussed under “sugar fields.” Lack of enough hot weather makes sugar cane cultivation unsuccessful in the Sacred Valley , but in the tropical areas 70 km farther north around Huadquiña and Ccolpani below Machu Picchu , cane cultivation did well. In the early colonial period, that hot country was in the same jurisdiction as Yucay.

  2. 2.

    E.G. Squier brought back from the Sacred Valley to the United States maize seeds that fit the description of MBGC. In 1865 Squier distributed some of those seeds to several farmers. In one Pennsylvania experiment, the corn grew between 4 and 5 m tall, but produced no ears. To explain that failure, Squier claimed the growing season was insufficiently long; more likely the photoperiod at 41° N was too long and the temperatures too high.

  3. 3.

    A topo varied in size depending on location. In the Sacred Valley , a common-sized topo was 88 varas long and 44 varas wide. A vara was approximately one yard.

  4. 4.

    The same acclimatization rationale is even better known in Bolivia, where it was said that Spaniards living in Potosí (4000 m asl) could not conceive and so went to La Plata (2850 m) to ensure successful reproduction.

  5. 5.

    The Orihuela family, whose history in Peru goes back 300 years, represented the Cusco elite. In 1825, Don Manuel Orihuela welcomed Simon Bolivar to his hacienda. His great grandson, José Orihuela Yábar, constructed a new casa hacienda in 1950 to exhibit his extensive collection of pre-Columbian artifacts and colonial canvases. Don José died in 1979, having succeeded in keeping title to a part of his estate after agrarian reform.

  6. 6.

    Before the agrarian reform, hacienda families in the Sacred Valley formed a relatively well-educated class. Hacienda Compone , which in the colonial period was known as Hacienda Huatabamba, was owned by Julio Corazao. He married Esther Giesecke Matto, the daughter of Albert A. Giesecke, North American rector of the University of Cusco .

  7. 7.

    The Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC ), founded in 1971, has become a major bureaucracy in Cusco with the power to undertake restorations, carry out digs, and deny authorization of archaeological work by others. Once subservient to Lima, the Cusco office no longer sends to the Ministry of Education a portion of the entrance fees collected at the archaeological or historical sites.

  8. 8.

    An oral history exists that in the decade of the 1940s a landslide and flood on the same Alcamayo swept away without a trace the old sawmill called La Maquina.

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Daniel W. Gade

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Gade, D.W. (2016). The Sacred Valley as a Zone of Productivity, Privilege and Power. In: Spell of the Urubamba. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20849-7_4

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