San Blas district in Cusco

San Blas, I think he was the patron saint of stairs

We lived in the San Blas district of Cusco which is about a 15 minute walk from the old colonial main plaza. The walk from the plaza to our apartment is pretty much all up hill. San Blas is one of the oldest residential areas in the city. The cobblestone streets are extremely narrow. Many of them culminate as stone steps. We climb 85 steps on our street to get to our place. Here is our street. At this point there are only a few more stairs before reaching our door but the street does keep going up much farther.

There are only a few streets in this neighborhood without stairs that cars can drive on. The traffic on these streets is 2 way except that the roads are wide enough for just one car. There are often standoffs as drivers negotiate who will back up to an intersection to allow two way traffic.

Sometimes we experimented with alternate routes home…. looking for streets with inclines instead of stairs. Once we seemed to be finding a good alternative route until we came to a mountain of stairs. We decided to climb them.

It was about the equivalent of climbing a 4-5 story building. There are people way above climbing the stairs. They look so tiny because there are so many stairs.

Here is a view from the top of the stairs looking back down.

At the top we were not quite sure where we were and hesitated to continue in a direction that would lead us down as that would mean we would again have to go up to get home. At the top of the mountain of stairs we saw some police. We stopped to ask them for directions. Our sense was to go up a little higher. They advised us not to. They said to continue to walk uphill in that neighborhood was dangerous, that there were robbers "up there". It seemed safe to us but we decided to heed their advice.