Hats Off to the Happier Virgins

By Nicholas Woodsworth, Financial Times, London

Virgin Marys are rarely figures of unconstrained glee, but the one I followed through the dark streets of Arequipa looked truly sad and dejected.

Why is it that the citizens of this southern Peruvian city choose to parade a particularly doleful Virgen Dolorosa - a Sorrowful Virgin - along their avenues each Easter? Is it perhaps because Arequipa is home to Santa Catalina, the largest cloistered convent in the world?

Here, for centuries, up to 500 daughters of wealthy colonial families lived lives of total seclusion, most of them against their will.

That, surely, cannot have been hugely amusing. But even the modern women of Arequipa seemed sombre as, lighted candles held before them, they followed the swaying Virgin through the streets.

Not only was she sorrowful in her long black robes, she was also heavy; two dozen men shuffled slowly and painfully beneath her litter while a melancholy band marked time with a lugubrious "Ave Maria".

There was only one person in the entire procession who had anything to smile about. Like all the band members, the trumpet player had sheet music clothes-pegged to the back of his collar.

Mischievously, he kept wiggling about so the poor trombone player behind him could not follow the score. So full of woe and despond were the proceedings, I rather admired him.

Did things lighten up later on? I never found out, for the next morning our little group of Easter celebrants became a party of explorers. Abandoning civilised Arequipa, we departed for the wilds of the remote Colca Canyon. With a cold dry wind spanking up dust, we bowled along the dirt roads of the altiplano for hours.

The elevated plateau of southern Peru is one of the most desolate regions on the continent. More than 13,000ft high, its sweeping plains are covered by sparse, ground-hugging vegetation and dotted about with snow-covered volanoes.

Life here is rude. On the road we waved at truckers howling across the flats on their way to remote gold and copper mines. Andean geese, vicunas, roaming llamas and the wind-blasted herdsmen who look after them were the only other creatures we saw on these wild, tundra-like heights.

Great was our surprise, then, when we abruptly shot down into a deep, narrow canyon, a split in the earth that left the barren altiplano well above us. Long ignored, only now coming into contact with modern life, the Colca Canyon is a world on its own.

It is an old world. It is shared, we learned as we settled down that evening in the thatched, adobe-built Parador del Colca lodge, by Indian groups who pre-date the Incas. It is also an odd world.

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver travelled to make-believe lands to meet beings with differently shaped heads. He need not have. Pointy-heads and Flat-heads have lived in the Colca for 1,500 years - all quite true, I was assured.

The upper section of the canyon is the home of the Collaguas, who long ago developed a sacred cult centred on Mismi, a nearby snow-covered volcano.

The lower section, on the other hand, is the territory of the Cabanas, whose own cult revered Hualca-Hualca, a volcano on the opposite side of the canyon.

Mismi is high and pointed. Hualca-Hualca is low and flat-topped. For reasons I am sure only they could explain, each group used wooden molds to shape the heads of their babies into forms resembling their respective volcanoes.

The practice was outlawed by Spain's colonial rulers, but old ways die hard. To this day the Collaguas wear white hats with high brims, the Cabanas brown hats with low brims.

Having volcano-shaped heads did not seem to have affected the canyon-dwellers' survival skills.

While other pre-Incas specialised in ceramics, textiles or stone-sculpting, both Collaguas and Cabanas, living in their steep-sided canyon, became absolute masters of mountain landscaping and irrigation.

The next day we hiked up the canyon-side through tier after tier of stone-built terraces. Fed from a waterfall high above, water burbled everywhere, through sluices and water-channels, dykes and ditches.

Maize, potatoes, broad beans, alfalfa and barley transformed the terraces, as they have for centuries, into a patchwork of greens and golds. Butterflies fluttered, giant Andean humming birds hummed, and high over the canyon condors soared through a cloudless sky.

It was paradise. For a brief moment I considered abandoning all to take up terrace-farming in the canyon. I had only one hesitation: which hat would I wear?

As a matter of fact, there are times when Colca villagers do not wear hats or much of anything else. This I discovered when I attended a crucifixion that afternoon in the village of Chivay.

Locals take Christ as seriously today as they used to take volcanoes. It was not the realistic 40 lashes on the village square that disturbed me in Chivay's reconstruction of the Easter Passion. Nor was it the genuine crown of thorns, or the vigorous poking Jesus received from spears wielded by legionnaires in home-made, tin-foil helmets.

No, what bothered me was the cold and knifing Andean wind that was blowing when they tied the poor man playing Christ to a cross and hauled him up wearing nothing but a loin-cloth.

In a few minutes he was authentically blue, and I thought he really might expire. The crowd, though, enjoyed it all enormously. Cold wind or no, Colca loves a celebration.

This was nothing, though, compared with the celebration held that evening in the neighbouring town of Yanque. In an old colonial church jammed with Indians in embroidered dresses and blankets, a wooden Christ with hinged arms was reverentially taken down from the cross. Handled as delicately as any real human, his body was undressed and washed, dressed again, then placed in a glass coffin.

The Virgin Mary, too, was prepared for a tour of the town. She stood in the strangest of conveyances, a tank-like contraption plated with all the village's silver and tin serving-trays and festooned with flowers, fresh fruits, chilli peppers and strings of coins.

Off the parade set through the streets of Yanque, splitting in two later to meet on the far side of town. I followed the Virgin's procession because it was such a joyous, energetic affair. The band played an odd, lilting, almost jazz-like air.

The Virgin lilted, too, carried along by dozens of white-gowned bearers who picked up a cadenced jog-trot and set the palanquin swaying and jangling crazily through the night.

So we made our way through the dark and muddy Yanque, as strange and ecstatic a procession as I shall ever take part in.

As happy as everyone else present, I could not help thinking of those lugubrious ladies of Arequipa. Easter is not necessarily a doleful time; it just depends on where you celebrate it.

* Nicholas Woodsworth visited Peru with Cazenove and Loyd Expediciones, specialists in tailor-made Latin American travel: 3 Alice Court, 116 Putney Bridge Road, London SW15 2NQ, tel: 020-8875 9666, fax: 020-8875 9444. He travelled with Iberia Airlines, tel: 020-7830 0011.

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