Ingapirca Temple of the Sun

2.5490°S, 78.8719°W.

Ingapirca in the Cañar Province of southern Ecuador — the largest Inca site in Ecuador, built between approximately 1487 and 1490 CE under the emperors Tupac Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Capac during the Inca expansion into the northern Andes. The complex is centred on the Temple of the Sun, an elliptical platform pyramid 37 metres long and 12 metres wide built of mortarless dressed andesite blocks fitted to the polygonal masonry standard of Inca elite construction at Cusco. The temple sits atop a much earlier Cañari religious site that the Inca incorporated rather than destroyed during their conquest of the region; the elliptical plan of the upper temple appears to follow the layout of the underlying Cañari structure. Excavated by Ecuadorian and Spanish missions from the early twentieth century. The east-facing entrance is aligned to the rising sun on the June solstice.

The northernmost major Inca site, with the only documented elliptical Inca temple-pyramid, built atop a Cañari sanctuary that the Inca religious system absorbed rather than replaced.