The Inti Raymi festival lasted nine days. The celebration honored Inti, the Inca sun god, and marked the southern winter solstice and the beginning of a new Inca year.
According to the account of the Inca historian Garcilaso de la Vega, Inti Raymi was the most important of Cusco’s major festivals. It included processions, music, dancing, ritual performances, feasting, and offerings intended to honor the sun and encourage prosperity and good harvests. The ceremony took place around the June solstice, when daylight begins increasing again in the Southern Hemisphere.
The historic festival was held in Cusco’s main ceremonial plaza, then known as Haukaypata. The last celebration attended by an Inca ruler took place in 1535, before Spanish authorities suppressed the ceremony and other Indigenous religious practices.
A modern theatrical reconstruction began in 1944 under the direction of Faustino Espinoza Navarro. Today’s event is staged on June 24 at locations including Qorikancha, Cusco’s Plaza de Armas, and Sacsayhuamán, but it is a reconstruction rather than an uninterrupted continuation of the original nine-day imperial ritual.