Hotel Monasterio by John Borthwick

In Cusco, Peru, the massive, ancient Inca masonry is so supple you'd swear the stones were woven. The ten, twelve, fifteen-sided blocks fit like plasticine, without mortar, to form ramparts that have endured the caprices of history – earthquake, invasion, revolution, tourism. On such foundations the Spanish Conquistadors, who sacked Cusco in 1533, built their own cathedrals and palaces. The resulting architecture is a tale of two histories – Inca from the knees down, so to speak, and Spanish above.

The Seminary of San Antonio Abad was founded in 1595 on the site of an Inca palace. Today it is the five-star Hotel Monasterio, under the management of Orient-Express-Hotels and listed on the Peruvian National Heritage register. Step across its threshold (beneath the royal escutcheon of Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain) and you brush against a time when these colonnades shaded both piety and intrigue. Quite accurately, this is sometimes described as a "museum hotel."

Wandering below ceiling beams marzipanned by centuries of whitewash, your progress is interrogated by the Spanish "friararchy" and remittance men whose varnished portraits look sternly down from the walls. Relax with a quick, strictly medicinal snort on the oxygen cylinder in the hotel lobby and a belt of coca tea from the adjacent urn — altitude headaches are likely for your first day or so in Cusco at 3325 metres. Then proceed through garden courtyards and flag-stoned corridors towards the Monasterio’s piece de resistance, its Baroque chapel. Not so much a private chapel as a pocket basilica, its candle-lit altar is an orgy of gold.

More portraits by the brilliant, anonymous Indian painters of the Cusquena School look down from the chapel walls. In particularly relevant work celestial hosts gaze down on lurid infernos and (as one author put it) "a demon even dares to appear before Christ, whispering sulphurous advice into the ear of a Jesuit who is advocating the closure of this very seminary." Somewhere beneath all this is a subterranean passage that obligingly ran from this all-male seminary to the next door convent of Nazarene nuns.

An air-conditioned guest room (some are monastically small) with cable television reminds you that you haven’t died and gone to the 17th century, but remain in a 21st century hotel. The Monasterio has 105 Guest Rooms, 16 Junior Suites and one Presidential Suite.

You can take coffee in the inner quadrangle beneath an 300-year old cedar that has witnessed the building’s serial incarnations — as a seminary, a Royal Pontifical University and, from 1965, an hotel. Finer dining takes place in a restaurant that was once the seminary refectory — don't miss local specialities like cebiche (poisson cru) and crème caramel.

The Monasterio's ambience is casual sans grunge. In evidence is much designer label “explorer wear” worn by principally North American and European guests, many on soft adventure tours that include Machu Picchu. Significant donations from guest revenues are made by the hotel to the Archbishop of Cusco’s fund for orphans and abandoned old people.

Taking a breather from all this cloistered ambience you step out into Cusco and its nearby centre, Plaza de Armas. The pimply seminarians and horny friars of San Antonio are long gone, but Cusco is still a university town. Its cobble-stoned streets are awash with students and backpackers. Internet cafes, pizzerias and lively music clubs are tucked behind centuries-old colonial portals.

By night the Plaza de Armas, flanked by World Heritage cathedrals — Cusco Cathedral and La Compania church — and dished in an Andean valley, is almost other-wordly. On the rim of the valley above the town, an illuminated statue of Christ is caught like a brilliant white bird in flight. Step out a little further and the soft geometries of that supple Incaic stonework — "pillow masonry" — become even more impressive at Cusco's giant fortresses of Sacsayhuaman.

The best is yet to come. Leaving Cusco on an early morning train you travel the Urabamba River valley to Machu Picchu whose stones remain in almost perfect condition, some 500 years after they were abandoned. Here the Incas made a citadel that poet Pablo Neruda described as “a city raised like a chalice".

Back at the Monasterio, an Inca harpist in the lobby maintains the transcendent theme. A few steps away is that unforgettable chapel which makes this perhaps the only hotel in the world where you might seek in-house forgiveness for — should it ever become one — the sin of wanderlust.