Chinchero, Peru
Cultivated Chinchero
Our first stop was Chinchero where we visited the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco which is run by local women’s weavers associations. Hand spun and hand dyed alpaca using traditional methods is their claim to fame. Our guide took us through all the steps from shearing (Alpacas are typically sheared once a year in February, unless they need a trim more often), to cleaning, spinning, dyeing and weaving. Interestingly, baby alpaca wool is not wool shorn from baby alpacas. This premium, softer wool is actually a quality grade. It is either the first shearing of a 1-2 year old “youth” or the finest fleece from an adult.
The white wool is dyed with natural flowers. The wool and leaves or flowers (depending on the colour) is boiled for one, two, three or five hours. The timing for each colour is critical for fixing the colour so it doesn’t run.
To clean the wool they use grated saqta root (aka Incan shampoo) and soak for an hour. The root contains saponins with create a mild, soapy liquid that cleans without damaging delicate fibres. Alpaca is naturally low in oils (unlike sheep’s wool) and regular detergents can damage it. Pretty magical how clean that dirty wool is by the end of it!
Blue is a special colour using the lupin flower with a longer dye time. The wool is soaked in a fermentation fluid for two weeks and then they add the lupin flowers for another two weeks. What do they use to ferment you may ask? Have a watch of the video!
Our lovely guide, Katia, outside where they do the boiling of the wool, and me sporting my new hat! FYI my hat is not blue and has no odd odours emanating from it.
Creative drainage along the street in Chinchero.
Outside the weaving centre were many stands with women selling textiles. They typically sit at their tables knitting. It begs the question of whether this “proves” that their wares are handmade by them or whether it’s just a ruse.
We happened upon a celebration, possibly the birthday of the family’s matriarch. The family members were playing instruments and guiding their elder past the front of the colonial church (which was built on top of Inca buildings as a reminder of the conquest and religious replacement) to sit at the foot of the cross. If you look closely at the cross you can see a great example of how the Inca people blended their beliefs with those of the Catholic Church after the conquest (so not full religious replacement). At the top is a carving of a sun which represents the Inca sacred sun, Inti. In the Inca worldview, the sun was the most important life-giving force reflecting the idea of divine light and salvation. At the bottom is a skull and crossbones, a European Christian symbol known as a memento mori (“remember you must die”), to remind us of mortality, the fleeting nature of life and judgment after death Quite the opposite of the sun at the top!
Our first archaeological site on this trip was the Chinchero Archaeological Site which would have been built as an Inca royal estate. All that’s left are the foundations of some of the buildings and the terraces, nestled under the Vilcabamba and Urubamba mountain ranges.
The terraces, which we see all around the province of Cusco, climbing up mountainsides, were important for farming, drainage and erosion control. These terraces were built as a practical use of land, broad and functional, rather than as an agricultural and architectural showpiece. It would have served not only the royal estate but also the region’s food needs.
A little “Abbey Road” vibe to our walk along the terraces.
Our first peak at the Sacred Valley, the breadbasket of the Incas. It was one of the most productive food regions in the empire. The microclimate of the valley and the fertile soils along the Urubamba River made this the perfect (and only) place to grow corn at scale. This was important because corn was sacred and strategic for the Incas. As a ritual crop for the Incas, corn represented political and religious power. Corn continues to be grown in abundance here, along with potatoes and other tubers, quinoa, beans and vegetables. And this is certainly what we are seeing and abundance of on our plates in restaurants!
uinoa growing roadside.
The Salt Pans of Maras are quite the co-op operation. It’s a relatively small scale operation with somewhere between 400-600 families operating the 3,000-5,000 ponds (not all are in production at any given time). The operation is entirely manual and solar-driven, just as it was in the Incan times.
The natural, mountain spring water comes out here at 24% salinity and 32C. It is then fed through hand built channels throughout the site to feed the pools. It takes three to four weeks from start to finish. Once the shallow pools are prepped and filled, farmers can manage the flow of water and concentration by opening and closing the channels. When the sun has done its job and the pools are dry and crusty on top, the farmer hand scrape the salt, dry it some more on little platforms by the ponds, sort it and bag it for sale.
This farmer is prepping his ponds for the next flooding. He is literally walking with tiny steps back and forth across his ponds to pat down the mud so it provides the right base for the salt water. There is constant production here as not all ponds are active at the same time. But dry season is the busy time with up to eight harvests.
Salt bagged and ready to ship to the next rung up in the distribution chain. And many rungs there are before Marasal pink salt ends up on the shelf of your local gourmet store. Here’s a quick view of the value chain. Starting with our humble farmer who will sell in bulk to local collectors (in USD) for $0.25-$0.30 per kg. The local collectors add a bit of value in sorting, cleaning and grading and will sell to regional processors/exporters who will wash, refine, grind to different sizes and export at $2-$6 per kg. The international gourmet market will then sell retail for $8-$20+ per kg depending on the grade. That’s 40x-80x increase from pond to grocery shelf…numbers the farmers could hardly conceive of.
Our final stop of the day was the Zona Arqueológica de Moray. Because the Inca didn’t leave any writings, it’s the archaeologists best guess as to what a site like this was built for. It’s likely that this was a big, open air agricultural laboratory. The series of concentric circles are 30-40m deep with temperatures ranging 15C from bottom to top and varying levels of humidity. The Incas would have tested crop varieties to see what performed best at which temperatures and humidity levels. The archaeologists found evidence of potatoes, corn, quinoa and other grains and possibly medicinal plants. This scientific marvel would have been in full swing 100-150 years before the Spanish conquest in 1532. It really makes one wonder what we would know about farming today if the Inca research was not interrupted by the Spanish…