Inca Garcilaso De La Vega

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born in Cuzco in 1539, in the former Inca Empire, to a Spanish father, the conquistador Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega, and an Inca mother, Isabel Suárez Chimpu Ocllo, who belonged to the Inca nobility. He was baptized Gómez Suárez de Figueroa and later took the name by which he is known. In 1560 he left Peru for Spain, where he spent the rest of his life writing in Spanish. His position between two cultures shaped his work: he drew on memories and accounts from his Inca relatives as well as Spanish histories, and addressed readers who often knew the Andes chiefly through European reports. His books belong to the Spanish literary world of the late Renaissance, while preserving a perspective rooted in his childhood in Cuzco.

In La Florida del Inca, Garcilaso recounts Hernando de Soto’s expedition in North America, drawing on testimony from people who took part. His best-known work, Comentarios reales de los Incas, describes Inca society, religion, government, and customs, and responds to earlier accounts he considered mistaken. Its continuation, Historia general del Perú, turns to the Spanish conquest and its aftermath. Across these works, Garcilaso considers how history is remembered and whose accounts are trusted. His prose joins a humanist interest in learning and interpretation with personal recollection and attention to language and cultural difference. The books offer a distinctive early account of the meeting of Inca and Spanish worlds. If you are curious about that history and the writer who sought to preserve it, his works make a rewarding place to begin.