Chinchay

Chinchay, or Chincha, was the kingdom of a seafaring and farming people in a wide, fertile oasis valley on the south coast of Peru, whose capital stood at La Centinela. Two adobe pyramids there, La Centinela and Tambo de Mora, housed the rulers, and artisans of silver, textiles, wood and pottery lived around them. Straight roads ran out from the city to ceremonial centres, to the Paracas valley and up to the Andes. The Chincha worshipped a jaguar or ocelot god and claimed descent from felines. They fertilized their maize with guano and took the sea with sail-carrying balsa rafts.

An early Spanish chronicle counted 30,000 households: 12,000 farmers, 10,000 fishermen and 6,000 traders, an unusual weight of sea and trade. Their merchants sailed along the coast with gold and silver work and Spondylus shells, and led llama trains up to the altiplano and Cusco. Pedro Pizarro heard Atahualpa say that the lord of Chincha controlled a hundred thousand rafts.

The Inca Pachacuti's brother Capac Yupanqui came to Chincha first with gifts, and the lord accepted Cusco's supremacy peacefully; under Topa Inca Yupanqui, around 1480, the valley was annexed, but its lord kept high honour and spent months of each year at the Inca court. At Cajamarca in 1532 he was the only man in Atahualpa's following carried in a litter, and he was killed there when the Spanish attacked. The Spanish founded Santo Domingo de Chincha as a reduction in 1571.