Inti Raymi, the Festival of the Sun, was the most important ceremony of the Inca calendar, held at the June solstice in Cusco to honor Inti, the sun god, and to mark the start of the new agricultural year across the Inca empire, Tahuantinsuyo. Established in its formal state ceremonial form by the Inca emperor Pachacutec in the fifteenth century, the original festival lasted roughly nine days and drew representatives from every region of the empire to the capital for sacrifice, feasting and dance performed in the sun god's honor.
The primary surviving account of the original ceremony comes from Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's 1609 chronicle Comentarios Reales de los Incas, compiled from the testimony of his mother's Inca relatives rather than from personal witness of the pre-conquest rite itself. Garcilaso describes the Inca ruler and assembled nobility waiting barefoot for the solstice sunrise with arms extended, offering sacrifice and chicha, while the Virgins of the Sun prepared ceremonial corn cakes and priests lit a new sacred fire by focusing sunlight through a polished gold mirror, a technical as well as symbolic act renewing the sun's fire on earth.
Spanish colonial authorities banned Inti Raymi in the sixteenth century as part of the systematic imposition of Catholicism and the suppression of Inca state religion, and the festival lay effectively dormant for close to four hundred years, its memory preserved chiefly through Garcilaso's chronicle and other colonial era accounts rather than through any continuous living performance.