Play The Sun Before Dawn

Anglo-Bolivian photographer Nick Ballón grew up hearing stories from his grandmother about their ancestor: Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, the Last Conquistador. Serra journeyed from Spain to Peru at the age of 17, playing a leading role in the conquest and plunder of the Inca Empire. A courageous soldier with a debilitating gambling addiction, legend tells that Serra lost a priceless golden image of the Sun God in a late-night game of cards. He outlived almost all his generation, dying in 1589 in Cusco – the former Inca capital – aged 78, wracked with guilt at his part in destroying the Inca realm: a lost utopia where “all things, from the greatest to the smallest, had their place and order.”

In April 2024, Nick and the writer and journalist Laurence Blair set out on Mansio’s trail, using Belmond’s hotels in Cusco and the Sacred Valley as a springboard to trace the conquistador’s six-decade career of greed and repentance. Nick registers hidden details at the palace atop Inca foundations inhabited by Mansio – today Palacio Nazarenas, A Belmond Hotel – and the Temple of the Sun, whose riches the conquistador helped melt down into portable loot. He journeys in Serra’s footsteps on his fateful last campaign, driving down winding roads beyond Machu Picchu to Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Incas. More than a two-dimensional homage to his distant relative, Nick’s images register the resilience of Andean communities as they strive to keep their identity alive amid a rapidly changing Peru.

Image above: Shadows fall on the Nazarenas Suite, probably Mansio’s former bedchamber.

Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire, stretched for 2,500 miles between Colombia and Chile: the length of London to Timbuktu. It also spanned huge vertical distances, with terraces and irrigation channels winding down Andean slopes some five thousand metres high.

On the mountain opposite Ollantaytambo, the Inca site of Pinkuylluna glows in the morning sun. The ruins are thought to have been granaries, storing the plentiful produce grown in the Sacred Valley.

Though worship of the Inca Sun God, Inti, was officially outlawed by the Spanish, the surviving Inca nobility incorporated solar imagery into their portraits and coats of arms.

Since being popularised by Hiram Bingham III in the mid-twentieth century, Machu Picchu remains the most iconic symbol of pre-Columbian Peru. But the soaring Inca citadel is barely 600 years old: a mere stripling compared to earlier Andean civilisations.

A garage door in Urubamba, a bustling commercial hub in the middle of the Sacred Valley, is designed to look like Inca stonework.

In the wake of an 1780 uprising lead by Tupac Amaru II, a descendant of the Incas, Spanish officials forbade Andeans wearing traditional dress. But the imposed European fashions of the age – bowler hats, knitted petticoats and flowing skirts – have since been reclaimed as a marker of identity in Indigenous communities across the Andes.

Locals walk past imitation Inca stonework made of pebbledash in Urubamba.

Stems of abatia parviflora, known locally as duraznillo and used to make black dye, wave in the Sacred Valley. Though native to the Americas, the tree is named after a colonial-era plant scientist from Seville, Pedro Abad y Mestre. The Spanish empire in the Andes not only extracted silver and labour but also foodstuffs and botanical knowledge.

A doorway at Vitcos, the capital of Manco Inca – a rebel emperor who escaped colonial Cuzco. He founded a dynasty that held out in the mountains of the Vilcabamba for a generation.

A mossy mandor tree lours over the hillside at Mandorccasa. A kind of carob, mandors can live for hundreds of years. This one may have witnessed Mansio and his fellow conquistadors marching down to capture Manco’s sons at Espíritu Pampa.

Edgar Roman pulls aside a curtain in the chapel of the Palacio Nazarenas. He has worked at Belmond’s properties across Peru for 22 years.

Offshoots of Tawantinsuyu’s aristocracy still live in Cusco. Alfredo Inca Roca, a descendant of the Inca Viracocha, has donned a golden costume eight times to play the Inca in Inti Raymi – the midwinter Festival of the Sun, revived in 1944.

Alfredo Inca Roca gestures to the ears of corn grown on his smallholding not far from Cusco. Peru today boasts 55 varieties of corn – from white to golden and purple – painstakingly improved by Inca agronomists, Alfredo’s ancestors.

The column that adorns the Nazarenas Suite. Though carved in classical Ionic style, the pillar is made of the dark volcanic stone characteristic of Inca temples.

Explore Peru with Belmond