The Andes mountain range was home to the Inca Empire.
The Inca Empire developed in the Andes, the immense mountain system running along the western side of South America. Its political heartland lay in the Peruvian highlands around Cusco, and its territories followed the mountain chain through modern Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina. This geography gave the empire its distinctive high-altitude character.
Andean landscapes were challenging but productive. Inca farmers built terraces, canals, and storage facilities to grow crops across steep slopes and at different elevations. Communities exchanged products from ecological zones ranging from coastal valleys to cold high plateaus and warmer eastern slopes.
The Rockies are mainly in North America, the Alps are in Europe, and the Himalayas are in Asia. They are all major mountain systems, but none was the setting of Inca civilization. The empire’s roads, administrative centers, and monumental sites—including Machu Picchu—were designed for the varied terrain of the Andes.
The Inca state reached its greatest extent in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, before Spanish conquest dismantled its political independence.