VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES IN THE 

SONDONDO VALLEY (PERU) 
 

 

E. Sáez 1, * , J. Canziani 1 

 
1 Centro de Investigación de la Arquitectura y la Ciudad CIAC, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú PUCP,  

Avenida Universitaria 1801, Lima, Perú - (esaez, jcanziani)@pucp.edu.pe 

 

Commission II - WG II/8 

 

 

KEY WORDS:  Cultural Landscape, World Heritage, Pre-Hispanic Urbanism, Vernacular Architecture, Andes, Perú   

 

 

ABSTRACT:  

 

Sondondo is an inter-Andean valley located between 3,500 and 4,500 meters above sea level. Inhabited, transformed and modelled 

since ancient times by the local rural communities, an extraordinary cultural landscape has been created through their particular 

relationship with the environment. Since the pre-Hispanic settlements (Wari 600 AD), through colonial indigenous “reductions”, to 

the villages of vernacular architecture, which are at the foundation of contemporary populated centres, the territory has been 

variously and successively settled, inhabited and transformed. Its vernacular architecture has evolved at multiple scales, from 

domestic architecture to urban structures. It has created spaces for agriculture and livestock herding, and the spectacular agricultural 

andenerías (farming platforms and terraces) that have shaped the territory for centuries. The latter simultaneously developed 

irrigation infrastructures and techniques. The result is a landscape of great plastic effects, in a geographical setting bordered by the 

apus — tutelar mountains — traditionally “sacralized” by the Andean cultures. Such enormous architectural-landscape legacy is now 

threatened by imported global models of false modernity disrupting the fragile balance of lifestyles and territories. The objective of 

this research project, ongoing since 2016, is to assess this territory, catalogue its vernacular architecture and landscape units. It also 

aims to propose projects and initiatives for sustainable local development. The work has been made available to the Ministry of 

Culture of Peru to support its request before UNESCO to include the site in its World Heritage List. 

 

 

 
*  Corresponding author 
1 All images come from de Project files. “Cultural landscapes, 

Sondondo Valley”. CIAC-PUCP, 2018. 

1. INTRODUCTION 

 

  

Figure 1. Farming terraces, Sondondo Valley.Source: Project 

files. Cultural landscapes, Sondondo Valley. CIAC-PUCP, 20181. 

 

Peru ranks among the most environmentally diverse nations in 

the world, with 84 of the 108 life zones defined for the Earth 

(Holdridge, 1967; Onern, 1976). Its complex territory features 

the Andean mountain range backbone, the world’s highest 

tropical mountain range, the coastal deserts — whose shores are 

bathed by the cold waters of the Humboldt current, and the 

humid tropical rainforests sloping down the eastern Andes 

toward the Amazon plain. The first occupants of this unique 

landscape were hunters and gatherers (10000 BC) who engaged 

in extensive domestication.  

This did not only include different plant and animal species, but 

they also the land itself through gradual cumulative 

transformations aimed at assuring vital water supplies, building 

adequate topsoil for production, and managing climate 

conditions. Altogether they aimed at creating ideal conditions 

for agriculture and animal herding in territories not naturally 

adequate for, or posed serious restrictions to, farming. 

 

Transforming such diverse territories across the different 

regions of Peru resulted in multiple cultural landscapes. These 

are an ancestral legacy asset of enormous value to the nation’s 

heritage. Even more so if we consider them as an invaluable 

testimony of the historical processes of productive 

specialization demanded by these transformations. Such 

changes came about with the emergence of complex forms of 

social organization, thus triggering the development in the 

Central Andes of one an outstanding and unique civilizing 

process (Canziani, 2007, 2009). 

 

However, despite this vast territorial legacy, there is practically 

not a single cultural landscape in Peru classified as a UNESCO 

World Heritage site. On the contrary, severe adverse impacts and 

accelerated degradation or destruction of these cultural landscapes 

are being driven by domestic “extractivist” policies framed by 

global resource exploitation. They are also the result of promotion 

of investments to develop natural resources, building the 

infrastructures required by this economic development model. 

Also, the pressures of a global development model, a foreign one 

but still influential — having formal and specific demonstrations 

even more different — contribute to these problems.  

The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLIV-M-1-2020, 2020 
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We feel it is of utmost importance to assess the legacy assets 

of Sondondo Valley and their registration in the UNESCO 

Tentative submitted by the Ministry of Culture. This 

constitutes a first step towards the valley’s nomination as a 

World Heritage site. Such nomination can be a fundamental 

tool for its safeguarding, and to protect the vernacular 

architectural legacy of this exceptional cultural landscape 

from growing deterioration and destruction.  

 

This requires preparing territorial and urban planning 

guidelines to regulate interventions that are essential to meet 

modern day needs. In turn, they will provide adequate and 

relevant responses to help preserve the invariant 

characteristics of the valley’s legacy architecture and 

landscape. Furthermore, they will lay down the foundations 

for sustainable local development planning, and the ongoing 

and sustainable adaptation of this living landscape’s 

traditional lifestyles to contemporary ones.  

 

This would allow facing the serious risk that emerges when, 

for example, the valuation of the archaeological heritage is 

segregated, and excludes the landscape and towns that are part 

of it. As a result, pathetic situations arise such as the ones in 

Cusco and the Urubamba valley, euphemistically called the 

"Sacred Valley of the Incas", where tourist mercantilism has 

turned archaeological monuments into a sort of theme parks. 

This irreparably degrades the territorial legacy and vernacular 

architecture of the historical centres of a cultural landscape of 

exceptional quality. 

 

This project was developed in consecutive phases between 

2015 and 2019. It was conducted by an interdisciplinary team 

of architects and archaeologists specialized in archaeology 

and landscape archaeology, architectural heritage, territory 

and landscape. 

 

After identifying the various components of the landscape, its 

units were defined by analysing and describing them. For this, 

mappings and photographic records were performed, 

including drone flyovers. 

 

 

Figure 2. Sondondo Valley. Hydrographic grid, towns and 

agricultural systems. 

On this basis, the inclusion of Sondondo Valley on the tentative 

list for World Heritage of UNESCO was suggested —all this in 

close relation with the communities and local authorities, the 

Ministry of Culture and UNESCO. Students of the Master’s 

Degree in Architecture, Urbanism and Territorial Development 

of PUCP participated in this project. This contributed to the best 

knowledge of the site and local communities’ wisdom.  
 

2. CULTURAL LANDSCAPES IN THE SONDONDO 

VALLEY 

2.1 The Sondondo Valley in the Peruvian Andes 

The province of Lucana is located in the region of Ayacucho, 

in the Andean heartland. In a land of high mountains and 

plateaus, the Sondondo Valley is flanked by two outstanding 

mountains, the Qarwarazu (5,124 meters above sea level) and 

the Osjonta (4,597 masl).  

 

Sondondo valley sits at the foot of its tutelar mountains or 

apus that in the Andean worldview symbolically connect the 

sky with the earth and the water that fertilizes it (Schreiber, 

1993, 2000). These revered mountains crown the high Andean 

plains of the ecosystem known as puna (4,000 - 4,800 meters 

above sea level), where extensive natural pastures support 

herds of wild vicuna (Vicugna vicugna) and domesticated 

alpacas (Vicugna pacos) as well as sheep and cattle. 

 

Ancestral livestock herding practices have led to the social 

transformation of these high-altitude territory. This includes the 

creation of wetlands by artificially flooding the grasslands to 

expand wetlands and pastures for animal herds. Another 

traditional practice is the building of different types of pens, 

generally together with small temporary shelters for the 

shepherds who manage the herds, and that create a vast wealth 

of formal, plastic and constructive diversity.  

 

Both systems materialize a subtle and radical relation with the 

environment at the highest altitude and demonstrate the 

ancestral communities’ capacity to sustainably anthropize them. 

 

 

Figure 3. Farming terraces and town. Andamarca. 

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Figure 4. Qarwarazu snowcapped mountain, a sacred mountain 

in Sondondo Valley. 

 

In these high-altitude plains, lagoons and wetlands are the main 

sources and reservoirs of water. They flow downstream along 

canal systems to irrigate the crops grown on farming terraces 

and platforms, and to supply water to local towns. 

 

Sondondo Valley’s hydrography is created by the relatively 

narrow canyon-like basins of the Negro Mayo and Mayobamba 

rivers that pour into the Sondondo River. This is where the 

name of the valley comes from. Its lower reaches, between 

2,500 and 3,500 meters above sea level, span a Quechua 

ecosystem of milder climate. There, agricultural systems of 

terraces and cultivation platforms have transformed a territory 

that today features remains of archaeological population centres 

and surviving colonial era settlements. 

 

 

Figure 5. Puna grasslands and corrals. 

 

Although vestiges of earlier farming terraces dot the valley, 

massive terrace propagation in the Valley would have 

occurred in the Wari period (600 - 1000 AD), during the 

expansion in the Central Andes of the first imperial formation 

prior to the Incas.  

 

These cultivation systems would be maintained during the 

subsequent local Rukana period, and then substantially 

expanded during the Inca era (1450 - 1532 AD). Such people 

privileged their intervention in the valley resulting in an area 

of greatest landscape beauty, both for the magnitude of the 

platform systems, and for the remarkable plasticity and 

composition of their modelling. 

 

Figure 6. Canyons in Sondondo Valley. 

 

This exceptional modelling results from the masterful 

adaptation of the terraces to the site’s topography and varying 

slopes. They run from the riverbed, through the plains to then 

reach their upper limit in the rocky escarpments of the 

mountains that canyon them. In addition to the modelling of the 

terraces, in the intermediate plains, it is common to find a 

unique arrangement of farms and pens.  Used alternatively, they 

were fenced by remarkably slender and delicately balanced 

stone walls. The delineation and the singular layout of these 

fencing walls bordering the fields create a landscape of unique 

texture over the plains that is a harmonious complement to the 

agricultural platform systems and the plotting of towns. The 

balanced integration of these landscape components or units 

enhances their overall value and gives a special character the 

valley’s landscape (Canziani, 2017) 

 

 

Figure 7. Farming terraces modelled on the topography with 

great plasticity. 

 

We will not deal here extensively with the other components 

that significantly enrich this landscape, such as its ancient local 

roads and especially segments of the Inca Trail, or Qhapaqñan, 

running across the Valley, nor the carved rocks showing 

landscape representations. However, the latter deserve a special 

brief mention because the location of these carved outcrops 

points to their direct correlation with the areas where the 

platform systems are deployed, and point us to water reservoirs, 

canals and especially bands of terraced fields scattered in the 

surrounding agricultural landscape. Presumably, these stones 

carried a symbolic character connected to their locations and 

were references for the ritual activities by the communities 

inhabiting the territory. 

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Figure 8. Carved stone. Luichimarca. 

 

2.2 The historical evolution of towns 

The valley’s documented archaeological evidence shows that, 

despite changes in social and political organization, as well as in 

historical settlement patterns, the valley areas were always the 

location of choice to settle. This continuous occupation would 

respond to a persistent strategy to concentrate the population in 

lower-level ecological floors of more benign climates. A place 

closer to areas amenable to more intense farming to feed the 

local population. Likewise, this location is centrally located vis-

à-vis the puna for grazing, and permits transverse vertical 

displacements from the populated centres, ensuring the agro-

pastoral integration typical of the local modes of production. 

 

Except for some remarkable local Inca monuments, the 

architecture of the archaeological sites, featuring these 

settlements also reveals a clear continuity, One is the use of 

building materials, principally stone and mud, and the other is 

the rationale of integrating closed and open living quarters. 

While the architectural typologies are diverse and changing, the 

logic to order the closed architectural spaces around an open 

space remains, be it a court or a terrace. 

 

 

Figure 9. Typical town urban-rural layout. South Cabana. 

Sondondo Valley. 

A case in point is Jincamocco, a Wari administrative centre near 

Cabana, where modular units surround a central courtyard. In 

Caniche, a Rukana settlement near Andamarca, despite the 

absence of a regular layout and the crowding together of 

architectural structures, these are, nonetheless, organized around 

open spaces or terraces to deal successfully with the steepness 

of the hill slopes where the site is located. This was also a 

consistent pattern in the characteristic kanchas of Inca 

architecture, where the roofed ambiances are arranged in a 

rectangular fenced module around a large central courtyard. 

 

 

Figure 10. Caniche, archeological village from Rukana era. 

 

After the conquest and the establishment of the colonial system 

in the 16th century, in Peru, the indigenous populations were 

resettled in the so-called "towns of Indians" or “reductions” 

created by Viceroy Toledo.  

 

These resettlement policies forcefully evicted the local 

population from their villages and hamlets and concentrated 

them in new settlements, built following the colonial grid 

layout. A central square surrounded by buildings representing 

the colonial institutions, namely a church, the town hall, the jail 

and the curaca’s (chieftain) house (Saito, Rosas, 2017). 

 

In Sondondo Valley, instead of a radical displacement, the 

people resettled around the old pre-Hispanic populated centers. 

They moved to nearby and preferably flat lands, that were more 

amenable the grid layout of the new towns and reductions. 

 

 

Figure 11. Rural tissue within the urban layout in South Cabana. 

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Another remarkable and noticeable change is that in the urban 

layouts of most of these towns, in addition to the characteristic 

grid layout of, rigidly aligned walls and facades. Also, their 

fabric follows an organic weave of canals, orchards, pens and 

lush green open spaces. The direct integration of this urban weft 

and warp to the rural fabric of the farms and the agricultural 

infrastructure of its surroundings. This results in the re-

territorialization triggered by the colonial event, where 

processes of resistance, negotiation and adaptation were 

combined with substantially indigenous territorial identity. 

Similar processes of syncretism in the peculiar imbrication of 

urban and rural urban tissues have been documented in other 

villages across the Andean region (Viñuales, Gutiérrez, 2014). 

 

2.3 The vernacular architecture 

In the fabric of these towns of colonial origin, beyond the 

indistinct civic or ecclesiastical buildings of their squares, the 

critical constitutive architectural element is the courtyard house, 

of deep Mediterranean roots. These houses were successfully 

introduced in Latin American colonial cities, leaving an 

indelible imprint that is at the foundation of all national and 

regional expressions of its architecture. They also translated, 

locally adapted and reinterpreted intense characteristics of 

Spanish vernacular architecture (Fisac, 1952; Flores, 1979). 

 

This is the case of Ayacucho’s regional architecture, which 

shares its most distinctive features with the vernacular 

architecture of the Sondondo Valley.  There, the patio houses 

open towards the interior and to the roofless spaces of their 

courtyards, orchards and corrals, through corridors or roofed 

galleries supported by slender wooden pillars rising on 

traditional carved stone pedestals. These intermediation spaces 

resolve the immediate integration of the enclosed or more 

intimate spaces of the dwelling, with the open spaces of the 

patio, the garden or chacras and the corral. Therefore, there is a 

a significant and vital coalescence with the mainly rural 

activities of their inhabitants. 

 

These spaces allow to take care and protect the vegetables, 

medicinal plants, fruit trees and seedlings grown there. They 

also allow the caring of domestic animals and the storing of 

hides, grains or farm tools of different sorts. Moreover, they are 

fundamental for providing thermal comfort in the cold nights 

when they release the heat they accumulated during the days of 

intense solar radiation characteristic of tropical latitudes.  

 

 

Figure 12. Vernacular architecture in Sondondo town. 

 

Figure 13. Intermediation spaces in a courtyard house, 

Andamarca. 

 

But these spaces are also of anthropological importance and for 

people’s lifestyles, as they provide the places where families 

meet and welcome visitors, check weather changes, and enjoy 

the surrounding landscape. 

 

These spaces of the rural universe within the living habitat 

extend concentrically. The circles of the small pens inside the 

houses (for example, for the care of sick or new-born animals, 

or about to give birth) are at the heart of larger circles around 

the towns, to finally reach the vast open spaces where herds 

graze freely. 

 

3. CONCLUSIONS 

 

The project intends to respond to the challenges raised by global 

models and integrate various efforts to counter the adverse 

impacts on the valley’s cultural landscape. These efforts include 

research and a cross-scale project, which connects and unifies 

view and efforts from the standpoint of architecture. 

 

The first thing to preserve in a landscape, built by the Andean 

communities through their understanding of and intervention in 

their environment, is the preservation and restoration of their 

territory and its natural anthropic components and the 

syncretism of its apus. These include: wetlands, corrals, 

agricultural terraces, networks of roads and canals, carved 

stones and others. 

 

 

Figure 14. A community woman walks down farming terraces 

from Inca times. 

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Towns show how the transformations underway in their original 

layout and their integration with the rural territory, with the 

multiple open spaces inside blocks serving as courtyards, 

orchards or pens, are changing their intense relationship with 

the environment. Gradual occupation of these areas interferes 

with sunlight and ventilation, degrading the climatic conditions 

inside the dwellings and the value of the urban-rural landscape. 

In this regard, it is necessary to revalue and maintain the open 

areas, as well as contain the densification of built-up spaces. 

 

The revaluation of vernacular architecture is essential as a germ 

of intimate and daily living that is intimately related to the 

landscape. Such architecture, despite its relevance and 

adaptation to local climates and available resources, is being 

replaced by new materials and styles considered strange in the 

local context. They degrade living conditions, destroy the 

urban-rural landscapes to which they belong, and hamper the 

cultural identity of the people, and the building of a 

contemporary identity and way of life rooted in their cultural 

traditions and territorial context. 

 

This landscape is of enormous cultural and environmental 

relevance since it is the testimony of the ancestral gradual 

construction and understanding of a complex environment. 

Therefore, its identification, analysis, understanding and 

categorization is the first step towards its preservation and 

future proposals.  

 

 

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los Andes. Cuaderno de Arquitectura y Ciudad de la Pontificia 

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PUCP, Lima. 

 

Canziani, J., 2017. Transformaciones territoriales y modelado 

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HERITAGE2020 (3DPast | RISK-Terra) International Conference, 9–12 September 2020, Valencia, Spain

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