Topographic Map of Cusco

Cusco, the historic Inca capital, sits at 3,400 m in a high Andean valley ringed by even higher ridges. The whole city is mountain terrain: the contour lines never drop to lowland, they thread between summits well above 4,000 m.

The terrain around Cusco

The old town fills the head of the Huatanay valley, with the Sacsayhuamán ridge rising immediately to the north and the Andean cordillera stacking behind it toward 4,500 m. Steep side-valleys feed in from every direction. On the map the relief is relentless — a dense field of contours with only the narrow valley floors as breathing space.

How this map was made

Every contour line traces a constant elevation drawn from public SRTM 30 m radar data, extracted with a marching-squares algorithm at a 100 m interval and coloured by height — cool blues in the valley climbing to warm reds on the summits. The satellite base layer and the contours share the same Web Mercator projection, so the lines fall exactly on the ground they describe.

You can regenerate this exact view — and change the interval, colours, resolution or export it as a print-ready SVG — directly in the TopoLines editor.