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Art, Film, Music & Dance, Climate Change & Disappearing Glaciers, Festivals, Sacred Rituals, Religion, Peru's Andes Mountains
Dancing for a Dying Glacier
Just back from the annual pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i, which takes place just below a 17,000-foot-high glacier (actually, three glacial tongues) in the southern Andes, about 80 miles south of Cusco. Since pre-Inca times, Qolqepunku Glacier has been revered as a sacred site associated with nearby Mount Ausangate, the tallest mountain in the region, considered by Andean people to be the area’s most powerful deity or “apu.” For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, local people have made the arduous journey to this remote, high-altitude glacier to pay homage with music, dance and offerings. In return, the apu grants health and fertility to the devotees, as well as to their families, their…
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Back from Qoyllur Rit’i & Ukuku Madness
El Fotógrafo and I are back from the pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i in the Sinakara Mountain range, 80 miles southeast of Cusco, where for three brutally cold nights (May 16 – 18) we camped out below Qolqepunku glacier, along with tens of thousands of pilgrims from parts of Peru and Bolivia. Our goal? To document, in photos and interviews, the changes that global warming has wrought on this 17,000-foot-high glacier, which is considered sacred by the Andean people, and to find out what pilgrims think about their revered glacier vanishing into the ether. It was a rough stint, but worth it: EF got some wonderful shots, I was able to…
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An American in Lima Goes to Qoyllur Rit’i
We’re in a frenzy here in our house packing to go on an expedition to a glacier near Mount Ausangate, in the southern Andes. Qolquepunku Glacier is the site of the ancient pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i, whose name in Quechua translates “Shining Snow Star.” More than 100,000 pilgrims come from all over Peru and Bolivia to pay tribute to “El Senor de Qoyllur Rit’i,” to climb the sacred glacier and to dance for days and nights at 17,000 feet above sea level. Yikes! The pilgrimage is ostensibly Catholic but has its roots in precolombian rituals that were practiced long before the Incas created their vast empire. The three dancers pictured above (photo courtesy El…
