Probably a large part of its citizens are of mixed Spanish and Quichua ancestry.  The Spanish conquistadores did not bring European women with them.  Nearly all took native wives.  The Spanish race is composed of such an extraordinary mixture of peoples from Europe and northern Africa, Celts, Iberians, Romans, and Goths, as well as Carthaginians, Berbers, and Moors, that the Hispanic peoples have far less antipathy toward intermarriage with the American race than have the Anglo-Saxons and Teutons of northern Europe.  Consequently, there has gone on for centuries intermarriage of Spaniards and Indians with results which are difficult to determine.  Some writers have said there were once 200,000 people in Cuzco.  With primitive methods of transportation it would be very difficult to feed so many.  Furthermore, in 1559, there were, according to Montesinos, only 20,000 Indians in Cuzco.

One of the charms of Cuzco is the juxtaposition of old and new.  Street cars clanging over steel rails carry crowds of well-dressed Cuzcenos past Inca walls to greet their friends at the railroad station.  The driver is scarcely able by the most vigorous application of his brakes to prevent his mules from crashing into a compact herd of quiet, supercilious llamas sedately engaged in bringing small sacks of potatoes to the Cuzco market.  The modern convent of La Merced is built of stones taken from ancient Inca structures.  Fastened to ashlars which left the Inca stonemason’s hands six or seven centuries ago, one sees a bill-board advertising Cuzco’s largest moving-picture theater.  On the 2d of July, 1915, the performance was for the benefit of the Belgian Red Cross!  Gazing in awe at this sign were Indian boys from some remote Andean village where the custom is to wear ponchos with broad fringes, brightly colored, and knitted caps richly decorated with tasseled tops and elaborate ear-tabs, a costume whose design shows no trace of European influence.  Side by side with these picturesque visitors was a barefooted Cuzco urchin clad in a striped jersey, cloth cap, coat, and pants of English pattern.

One sees electric light wires fastened to the walls of houses built four hundred years ago by the Spanish conquerors, walls which themselves rest on massive stone foundations laid by Inca masons centuries before the conquest.  In one place telephone wires intercept one’s view of the beautiful stone facade of an old Jesuit Church, now part of the University of Cuzco.  It is built of reddish basalt from the quarries of Huaccoto, near the twin peaks of Mt.  Picol.  Professor Gregory says that this Huaccoto basalt has a softness and uniformity of texture which renders it peculiarly suitable for that elaborately carved stonework which was so greatly desired by ecclesiastical architects of the sixteenth century.  As compared with the dense diorite which was extensively used by the Incas, the basalt weathers far more rapidly.  The rich red color of the weathered portions gives to the Jesuit Church an atmosphere of extreme age.  The courtyard of the University, whose arcades echoed to the feet of learned Jesuit teachers long before Yale was founded, has recently been paved with concrete, transformed into a tennis court, and now echoes to the shouts of students to whom Dr. Giesecke, the successful president, is teaching the truth of the ancient axiom, “Mens sana in corpore sano.”