In the Shadow of the Condor

Juliet Clough in the Colca Valley

by Juliet Clough. The Observer, London. February 14, 1999

Juliet Clough explores Peru's southern reaches and discivers the strong women who live amid the world's best kept scenic secret.

"Peruvian men", says Marisol gloomily. "I tell you, Juliet, disaster area!" We are contemplating a brochure picture of three aristocratically ponchoed and moustachioed riders, spurred boots thrust into bucket-sized stirrups, thundering smugly across a double page spread.

I think they look pretty fanciable, but Marisol, who is doing a god job of diverting me from the combined effects of jetlag, high altitude and lack of sleep, is off again: "Here a well-bred woman is supposed to be a good shopping and look nice; she mustn't have a brain. If she wants to talk, family matters or gossip about the maids will suffice. "she adds a chilling piece of Arequipa scandal , about a society wife, discardedby her husband in favour of a younger model and currently in a coma following a last-ditch facelift.

Despite this odds, Marisol Mosquera recently gave up a meteoric career as a young investment banker in London, in favour of returning home to Perú to set up her own travel company -perhaps being both beautiful and good at shoping and gossip helps. Aracari Travel is a window on the glamour and style of a country which in the West, she says is too often regarded only as a backpacker's destination.

This is her place, but where are the macho individuals? Mauricio de Romaña , an old friend, hardly fits the bill. When, in the early 1970's, his family estates were sequestered along with those of most of the rest of Peru's landowning class, Mauricio bought a patch of stony ground in a bend of the Rio Colca and chanelled his visionary idealism into the conservation of a forgotten corner of the Andes.

Three undred kilometers north of Arequipa, he build a modest, seven-room, solar-powered lodge, EL Parador del Colca, first growing his own thatch to top the adobe walls and planting the sorrunding agricultural terraces with vegetables and indigenous plants. Mauricio potters amiably about his garden, pointing out newly planted cacti and polylepis, the latter said to be the highest growing tree in the world. Now and then he sets up a telescope and distant knobbles on the horizon spring into focus as Inca fortresses and lookout posts. His big projects include a vicuña rescue programme and the creation of a sanctuary above with the Andean condors can sail unthreatened.

The Colca Valley, cleft by a 100 km-long gorge which, at 3,182 m deep is twice the size of Arizona's Grand Canyon, is gradually emerging on the tourist scene as an eight wonder of the natural world. Once a key route between the silver mines of Bolivia and the coast , and with its own wealth of silver and gold, the Coca valley fell prey to the Spaniards, who arrived here in 1540. The conquistadors packed the farmers off to work in the mines and reorganized the scattered agricultural community into 14 villages or reducciones, each with its neatly laid-out square or plaza and handsome baroque church.

But the population declined and war with England engrossed Spain once more. By the time the railway reached Arequipa, the Colca Valley was off the map, completely forgotten. It wasn't until 1975 that valley got a real road. In 1981, the river at the foot of the canyon was navigated for the first time by a team of Polish students.

Unimaginable isolated, a few villages cling to the depths of the gorge, at the foot of paths which snake skywards to peter out in clumps of cacti, or simply to vanish, ghostlike, on the direction of the old silver and old mines at Caylloma. Condors, three metres from wingtip, cruise the thermals between ranks of snow-topped volcanoes, every feather subtly adjusting to the slightest updraught.

But, from the moment we enter the valley, it is the human touch, doggedly imprinted on all this sublimity that catches at the heart. Gravity-defying terraces, worked for 1,000 years before the Incas put in their brief appareance, hugh the contours for more than 800 metres up from the valley floor, where the Andean staples of beans, potatoesand quinoa grain are still grown. At Choquetico, we stop to admire a shadow stone, a boulder whose surface, carver in undulating ripples, exactly reflects the terraced hillside behind.

The players in this grandly tiered amphitheatre look like extras from an 18th century Spanish court piece. Colca women wear two or three gorgeously embroidered skirts. Their hats, white, beribboned boaters or brightly stiched black felt, indicate whether day are Collagua hill people or Quechua-speaking Cabana from the valleys.

We find hat stalls in the market at Chivay and try on a few, glad that there is no one around to disapprove of this girls ploy. Two rosettes on your boater indicate spinsterhood. 'Get married and you lose a rosette', the stallholder smirks. Of all the ladies of the Colca Valley, the one hailed as its star by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa is a 76-year-old American nun, mother Antonia. We find her and a recently arrived companion, Sister Joan, at home in freezing corner of Yanque's 17th century Franciscan monastery. Mother Antonia, a special friend of Marisol, hugs us both. Tiny and stooped, this formidable product of the Bronx has been feeding, counseling, bossing, dosing and generally nurturing the 1,700 souls of Yanque for the past 27 years. This morning, she tell us, slipping into Quechua when the English word proves elusive, she set a broken arm but the patient was soon back after having tried to carry a bucke of water. In Yanque, it is Mother Antonia who arbitrates in disputes and tears strips off wife-beating husbands. She is famous, says Marisol, for having sorted out a threatening trio of village bullies, by standing on tiptoe to puch the ringleader.

From her house every weekday at 5am, a breakfast of bread and thick vegetable soup is served to between 800 and 1000 people. For many it will be the only meal of the day. Wearing a scarlet fleece and jogging trousers, with bare feet tucked into the ubiquitous ojotas or rubber tyre sandals, Mother Antonia show us the wheat and barley fields she tends herself, her adobe greenhouses bursting with good soup ingredients. She cooks a mean chocolate cake too, says Marisol, 'in an oven made of old kerosene tin'.

In Sibayo, another of the reducciones, deserted adobe houses crumble along streets named after Spanish saints, empty but the odd hand cart piled with alpaca fleeces. We manage to talk ourselves into the locked church. The conquistadors' churches, untouched for four centuries are notoriously impregnable but, as two gringas, perhaps we appear unlikely looters. Sibayo's saints lean drunkenly on their gilded reredos, their crowns gone, the silver prized off the sanctuary doors, the pictures torn by attempts to wrench them off the walls. 'It never used to be like this', says the custodian sadly.

Converting the people of the Colca valley to Christianity must have been an uphill job. The shrine to Santa Rosa of Lima, placed at the entrance to Sibayo, contains a human skull, 'to keep the village safe at night', the custodian tells us. 'Is it OK to take a photograph?' we ask a man lounging outside the police station nearby. 'Don't ask me, I'm a detainee', he replies.

The pictograms and rock tombs which scatter the valley suggest beliefs firmly entrenched millennia before the Spaniards arrived. Stopping to admire the carved llamas and condors in one cave on the way from Arequipa, I put my hand in the soft soil at its furthest end and come up with a fistful of old bones and fragments of pottery. Our bleak route across the Andes has been full of rarities: grops of vicuña by the roadside, definitely the Margot Fonteyns of the camel world; Chilean flamingoes and black ibis, standing decoratively araoun a marsh at over 4,000 m high.

Among the volcanoes which ring Arequipa, Ampato (6,318 m) grabbed the headlines when, in 1995, Chicago anthropologist Johan Reinhard discovered near the summit the frozen mummy of a 14-year-old Inca girl. The Ice Maiden, Juanita, as she is affectionately known in Arequipa, died five centuries ago, presumably a sacrifice to the life-giving powers of the mountain. Her body was full of drugs, her skull bashed in, her grave stocked with exquisite pottery, statues and textiles, all of which, including the pathetic remains of Juanita herself are on display in Arequipa's archeological museum.

'And how's this for another sort of sacrifice?' asks our guide, Liz, steering us across the road and into the enclosed Dominican Convent of Santa Catalina. Built, like the rest of all Arequipa, of white volcanic tufa, the 16th century convent was virtually a town of women. Behind its high walls, swallows fly trough flowery streets and shuttered rooms where maids once served well-connected nuns off Spode and gilded Sevres. In the cloister where 12 and 13 year olds sought their vocations, a gorily-flagellate Christ holds a tiny mirror between his teeth, enabling the kneeling postulant to see her image in the mouth of God. It is pointless to judge Arequipa trough 20th century eyes, though our hotel, the Libertador,is a model for five-star comfort. Rather, look at it as a bridge between the Spanish and Andean worlds. Angels with Indian faces peer trough the jungle foliage carved over the façade and cloisters of the great Jesuit Church of la Compañia; inside, painted parrots riot across San Ignacio's chapel walls.

Arequipa was called 'the white city' not for its pearly stone but for its determinedly Spanish identity, 'We're rather grand here', confides Marjorie Michell, one of a stalwart body of Anglo Arequipeño citizens whose forebears arrived las century to build the railway and launch the alpaca trade. 'You know, Poppy Day in the garden and so on'.
Marisol, Mother Antonia, Juanita, the nuns of Santa Catalina and Marjorie: it seems to have been a week of stalwart women. The riders in the brochure would certainly look at home in the white city, but who needs them?.