Epic Travel → Central and South America → Peru → Cruzmoqo

♦ Intrepid Top Pick!

Location: Tipon Archaeological Park, Sacred Valley, Southeast of Cusco

Time Required: 3 hours

Red Tape/Notes: Cruzmoqo is inside the Tipon Archaeological Park, so you’ll need either the Cusco General Tourist ticket ($130 for foreigners as of 2017) or a Cusco Circuit 2 ticket ($70 for foreigners as of 2017) to get into Tipon. Which ticket you want will depend on what else you’re seeing (and when you’re seeing it). Visit this website for more information on the various ticket types and to purchase tickets.

What’s Nearby?: Mountain Biking, Cusco, Saqsaywaman, Oropesa Bread Making, Pikillacta, Tipon

If Tipon is considered a “rarely visited site”, I don’t know what you’d say about Cruzmoqo. It’s technically one of the sectors of the Tipon Archaeological Park, at the north boundary, and is considered to have been an important checkpoint and outlook station, though very little remains of the original structures at the site (with the exception of the surrounding defensive outer walls, which are super cool). Despite this, the site can be easily identified from below as a prominent natural rocky outcrop high in the hillside above Tipon. If you look at the Tipon site on Google Maps with satellite imagery on, you should see the “Sendero a Cruzmoqo” path marked on the east side of the park, ending at the outcrop, and you can see that there are extensive ruins of the northern defensive walls to the north and west of Cruzmoqo along the crest of the hill. Cruzmoqo is also called Qosqo Qhawarina or Mirador del Cusco, since you can see all the way to Cusco from it, so you can imagine that the effort to reach the site isn’t insubstantial. There is significant elevation gain (you’ll ascend around 2,000 feet; Cruzmoqo is at 13,000 feet), but I’m not sure about the actual distance (maybe 4 miles round trip, the way we went??). The journey may be easier if you can find and take the supposed trail on the east side of the park (the Sendero a Cruzmoqo); we opted to follow the irrigation canals up the mountains on the west side of the park and approach via livestock trails and along the remains of the defensive walls because that seemed more fun. We had planned to find the official Cruzmoqo trail on the way back down, but never saw it – it may be that it’s so rarely used that it’s overgrown. There are petroglyphs decorating the rocks around Cruzmoqo that date to 2000 BCE, but this site is so rarely visited that it’s hard to find information on them – I didn’t know about the petroglyphs at the time we were there, so I am super bummed. The best resource I’ve found is this paper, which has some super interesting details from their investigation of the site (Cruzmoqo is covered on pages 58 and 59, although there are loads of other hidden gems and interesting things mentioned in the rest of the report, as long as you’re willing to wade through the majority of the information on hydraulic capacities, flood control and the like).

Epic Travel → Central and South America → Peru → Cruzmoqo