Museo Inkariy

Museo Inkariy presents a dynamic experience through artistic installations representing over five thousand years of history, from Caral to the Incas.

Planning your visit

Museo Inkariy takes an unusual approach for Peru: rather than displaying excavated artefacts, it uses life-size dioramas and artistic reconstructions to present nine successive pre-Hispanic cultures — Caral, Chavín, Paracas, Nasca, Moche, Wari, Tiahuanaco, Chimú and Inca — across some 5,000 years.

The value of that is chronological clarity. Most visitors arrive in Cusco knowing the Inca and nothing before them, and the Inca empire lasted barely a century before the Spanish arrived. Seeing the sequence of civilisations that preceded it — Caral contemporaneous with the Egyptian pyramids, Moche metalwork and portrait ceramics, Nasca lines and Paracas textiles — reframes the Inca as the last of a long development rather than the origin of Andean civilisation.

The reconstructions are theatrical rather than archaeological, which some find effective and others find simplistic, but the structure does the explanatory work.

It sits at Calca in the Sacred Valley between Cusco and Ollantaytambo. Bookable options combine it with Pisac market and ruins, Ollantaytambo and lunch on a hop-on Sacred Valley route. Current availability is listed below.