Cusco’s rainbow flag is one of the most misunderstood symbols in Peruvian iconography. Seven horizontal stripes in the rainbow colours — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — adopted by the municipality in 1978 as the standard of the former Inca capital.
The historical claim is that it is a modern revival of the Wiphala, the Andean rainbow banner used in some pre-Columbian rituals, though historians are divided on whether a seven-stripe horizontal flag was actually used by the Incas themselves. The post-1978 version is unambiguously a civic flag of modern Cusco.
You’ll see it flown everywhere in the city — on municipal buildings, over Plaza de Armas, on taxis. It also gets confused with the LGBT rainbow flag, which is a different design (six stripes, red on top not bottom).
Peruways runs Cusco walking tours that cover the history of the flag along with the Inca-to-colonial architectural layers. Book at Peruways.
