Ingapirca
Why did the Inca, whose sun temples were everywhere else rectangular or circular, build the only known elliptical Sun Temple in their entire empire here — wrapping mortar-free masonry around a natural Cañari rock and aligning it to the solstices — on ground they had just taken from a people they chose not to erase?
late 15th to early 16th century CE (Inca, reign of Huayna Capac, over an earlier Cañari settlement) · Ingapirca, Cañar Province, EcuadorAdded July 2026