Cutimbo

Chullpa necropolis on a flat-topped volcanic promontory rising off the altiplano 22 km south of Puno, its summit at about 4,060 m. The burial towers are the reason to come : unlike the uniformly cylindrical chullpas at Sillustani 35 km north, Cutimbo carries both round and square-to-rectangular towers on the same plateau, built of fitted volcanic blocks laid without mortar, several of them carved with relief figures of Andean animals including the puma, the condor and the serpent. Conventional reading : a Lupaca and Colla necropolis of the Late Intermediate period, roughly the 13th to 15th centuries, taken over and added to under Inca rule after about 1450. The detail that makes the site worth an entry of its own is underneath all of that : the rock shelters in the same promontory hold paintings estimated at over 8,000 years old. The hill was in use eight millennia before the towers went up on it, which makes Cutimbo a stratigraphic question rather than only a funerary one, and raises the same question the square and round towers raise : how many separate building phases are stacked here, and who built the earliest of them.

-16.0333°, -70.0667°

Walkthrough videos (1)

Mystery Cutimbo: The Giant Towers of Lake Titicaca · Sorcerers of Stone

Nearby sites

• Chucuito (Inca Uyo)25 km
• Sillustani35 km
• Aramu Muru58 km