Peru Guide
Cusco
Museo Histórico Regional y Casa Garcilaso
Once the residence of Garcilaso de la Vega, a prolific half-Inca (his mother may have been an Inca princess), half-Spanish poet and author, the mansion now known as the Museo Histórico Regional y Casa Garcilaso is currently home to significant regional archaeological finds and much of Cusco's historic art. Fascinating pre-Inca ceramics from all over Peru are displayed, plus a Nasca mummy in a foetal position with typically long (1.5m) hair, embalming herbs and unctures, black ceramics with incised designs from the early Cusco culture (1000–200 BC) and a number of Inca artefacts such as bolas, maces, architects' plumb-lines and square water-dishes used for finding horizontal levels on buildings. The museum also displays gold bracelets discovered at Machu Picchu in 1995, some gold and silver llama statuettes found in 1996 in the Plaza de Armas when reconstructing the central fountain, and golden pumas and figurines from Sacsayhuaman. From the colonial era there are some weavings, wooden quero drinking vessels and dancing masks.
The main exhibition rooms upstairs house mainly period furniture and a multitude of Cusqueña paintings, which cross the range from the rather dull (religious adorations) to the more spectacular (like the famous eighteenth-century Jacob's Ladder). As you progress through the works you'll notice the rapid intrusion of cannons, gunpowder and proliferation of violence appearing throughout the 1700s, something which was reflected in Cusco art as a microcosm of what happened across the colonial world – emanating from Europe as part of the general march of technological "progress".