Inti Wak'a

The Inti Wak'a at Chan Chan marks the sun shrine within the greatest city of the Peruvian coast. In Quechua a wak'a is a revered place, rock or monument where Andean communities invoked spirits.

From about 900 Chan Chan was the capital of Chimor, whose palace-mausoleums, ceremonial pyramids and plazas formed a sacred landscape devoted above all to the royal ancestors and to the Moon, which the Chimú ranked above the Sun. The city kept its own solar cult, until the Inca emperor Túpac Yupanqui besieged it in 1470, cutting the aqueducts and incorporating Chimor into the Inca Empire.

Inca rule drew the local wak'a into the state cult of Inti, the sun god and divine ancestor of the ruling dynasty. When the Chimú rebelled around 1500, Huayna Cápac sacked and partly burned the city, but the adobe shrines among its ruins continued to be venerated.