Moray is located 62 km from Cusco and 7 km west of Maras. It is at an altitude of 3500 m.
Discovered in 1932, Moray is enigmatic to visitors. Its impressive circular platforms, which look like giant fingerprints, make one think of a gigantic agricultural laboratory. However, many interpretations go by the side of the astronomical observatory or the cult in a primordial sense.
Moray, which thinks of adapting plants to new climate environments, further proves the high level of agronomic knowledge attained by the Incas.
According to the anthropologist John Earls Moray, the Incas built an agricultural laboratory to recreate a series of microclimates and plant various experimentally improved crops.
The temperature of the floor of each platform determined that the Incas managed to develop twenty ecological zones in miniature where they produced grains such as quinoa and kiwicha, squash and squash, and, of course, multiple varieties of potatoes.
The Moray terraces were an experimental station formed by immense conical depressions cut in the limestone, 47 to 84 m deep. According to the platform’s depth, different climates were denoted.
Like an artificial crater, Moray terraces resembling a sunken amphitheater were built on retaining walls filled with fertile soil and irrigated by complex irrigation systems. This way, the thermal variation between the surface and the bottom of these natural holes was used to adapt different varieties of plants (more than 250 plant species) on each terrace.
Moray is 38 km northwest of Cusco and 7 km southwest of Maras. The road leaving the village allows cars to arrive.