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Ollantaytambo lies at the northwestern end of the Sacred Valley of the Incas, about 60 kilometres from Cusco, where the Patacancha river meets the Urubamba. It was built in the mid-15th century as a royal estate of the emperor Pachacuti, who conquered the region, and combines an agricultural, administrative, and ceremonial complex with a planned town. The modern town below preserves the original Inca street grid and canal system, making it one of the few places where Inca domestic urban planning can still be walked.
Above the town rises the ceremonial centre, reached by a long flight of steep stone terraces (andenes) that both supported agriculture and monumentalised the approach. At the summit stands the unfinished Temple of the Sun, dominated by the celebrated "Wall of the Six Monoliths": six enormous slabs of pink rhyolite (porphyry), the largest several metres tall and weighing dozens of tonnes, set in a row and separated by thin spacer stones. The stone was quarried at Kachiqhata, several kilometres away on the far side of the Urubamba, and at a higher elevation — meaning the blocks had to be moved down a mountain, across the river, and up the terraced hillside. Unfinished blocks abandoned along this "ramp" route, and others stranded mid-transport, give rare insight into Inca quarrying and haulage.
In 1536, during Manco Inca's great rebellion against the Spanish, Ollantaytambo served as his stronghold. When a Spanish cavalry expedition under Hernando Pizarro advanced up the valley to capture him, the Inca defenders fought from the terraces and even flooded the plain below by diverting the river, repelling the attack — one of the rare Inca battlefield victories of the conquest. Manco Inca later withdrew to the remote refuge of Vilcabamba, and the Spanish eventually took the site.