The Inca Royal Road
—Jason

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One of the most important factors in a massive empire is the ability for its citizens, soldiers, and goods to easily travel the length and breadth of its territory.  While the European road system of the Roman Empire is one that most people have learned about, the Americas also had extensive highways as well.  The most impressive pre-Columbian road network in South America was created by the Inca Empire: it is at least 25,000 miles long and stretched from one end of their kingdom to the other. 

The Inca were a people native to the western coastline of the South America whose an empire spanned the Andes Mountains from 1000 – 1450 CE.  Major cities, teeming with thousands of inhabitants, dotted the peaks of the highest mountains in the New World.  Beyond the mountain settlements, the Inca also had numerous towns and villages in the valleys and near the Pacific Ocean coast, all of which needed to be protected and have their trade goods available for markets near and far.

Moving people and goods across the incredibly dangerous natural landscape presented a difficult problem to the growing Inca Empire.  Not only did the mountains stand in the way of easy transport, but the Inca also lacked the wheel: anything that needed to be moved either had to be carried by humans or llamas.  To facilitate movement, the Inca designed two road systems that ran north to south: one along coastline and the other running further inland and in the higher elevations. 

The construction and maintenance of this massive Royal Road was a never-ending project overseen by the Incan rulers.  Massive engineering projects were needed to carve the living stone of the mountains into flat roads, stairs, retaining walls, and water drainage systems.  Steep flights of carved stairs provide a traveler with a breathtaking, and terrifying, vista of the mountains and jungles that made up, and surrounded, the Inca Empire.  Where solid stone roads could not connect the mountains, bridges made of rope and planks stretched over yawning chasms.  The Inca adapted and conquered the landscape to ensure that their people were connected despite the best efforts of nature.

The Inca Empire relied on this network to provide political and territorial cohesion for their 12 million people.  Trade and information were important, but so too were the needs of religious festivals and military endeavors.  The Inca connected their own, and other cultures’, religious sites to the Royal Road.  This allowed priests, kings, and commoners to attend the required rituals and festivals that ensured the success and survival of the empire.  Machu Picchu is the most famous, and heavily traveled, of the Inca refuges and religious sites.  The Royal Roads was also essential to the Inca military in maintaining internal order within the empire and to fend off outside threats.

Buildings and administrative structures were spread throughout the entirety of the Royal Road to facilitate the spread of information and to provide shelter and supplies for the travelers.  Relay stations were set up at short distances to facilitate the movement of messages brought via the chasquis, Inca runners, who could move up 240 kilometers a day.  Warehouses and shelters were also spread out within a day’s march of each other.  At the borders of the empire, fortresses were constructed to garrison soldiers to guard against outside raids or serve as a jumping point for future expansion. 

While the Inca Empire was responsible for the largest expansions of the Royal Road, they were not its only builders.  Predating the Inca were the Tiwanaku and Wari Empire and they had started the vast road network.  The Tiwanaku Polity existed between 600 – 1000 CE and encompassed the Andes Mountains in what is now western Bolivia.  The Tiwanaku appear to have been a collection of various peoples who worked together to create religious sites and the routes that connected them; there were no defensive features found at the regions they inhabited.  The Wari Empire was a later culture that developed to the north, in central Peru.  The Wari maintained and extended the road network that their predecessors had laid.  The Inca’s predecessors had left a well-established, if not consistent, network from which they could expand f. 

The destruction of the Inca Empire by Spanish conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, in November 1533 ushered in a new era for the Royal Road: completion of the conquest of South America’s largest native kingdom.  Pizarro struck the Inca during a period of civil war over the succession.  The Spanish commander offered to be a neutral party to oversee peace, but once in the Inca capital he captured and then killed the royal sons.  The Royal Road was used by the Spanish to shift soldiers from one area of the former empire to the other until native resistance was crushed.

The Spanish resettled many of the surviving Inca away from their highland cities after their conquest.  The Spanish hoped that by moving the people out of the towering Andes, they would be more docile under European rule.  By moving the Inca from their traditional mountain settlements, the Spanish inadvertently damaged the Royal Road: without the people to maintain it, many stretches of the Royal Road disintegrated.  The new crops the Spanish introduced also altered the landscape as many of the famous terraced fields of the Inca disappeared through neglect and erosion.

Today, remnants of the Inca Royal Road still survive and are used in a variety of ways.  Those sections that connect to the rediscovered sites such as Machu Picchu are in good repair to help facilitate the movement of tourists.  Other routes have been converted and reinforced to create the Pan-American Highway which runs north, south, east, and west.  The Andes Mountains are still home to the descendants of the Inca, and countless other native peoples, and they still visit many of the same sites that their ancestors held as culturally and spiritually important.