Qoyllur Rit'i — the Snow Star pilgrimage

Qoyllur Rit'i is held in the days before Corpus Christi, sixty days after Easter, when the full moon falls — late May or June. Pilgrims gather from the surrounding Quechua 'nations', principally Paucartambo and Quispicanchi, and walk through the night from the trailhead at Mahuayani up to the sanctuary in the Sinakara valley, set at around 4,700 metres beneath the Qullqipunku glacier. There a Christ — the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i — is venerated on a painted rock, and at the same time the mountain itself is honoured: the two devotions are not separable, and pilgrims hold both at once. The rite's guardians are the Ukukus (or pabluchas), figures dressed as the half-human, half-bear creatures of Andean myth, who police the pilgrimage with whips and humour and, in its central act, climb onto the glacier in the cold dark before dawn. They once cut and carried down blocks of glacier ice, believed to be sacred and medicinal; as the glacier has retreated sharply with climate change, the cutting of ice has been curtailed or stopped, and the Ukukus now bring down crosses set on the ice rather than the ice itself — a living adaptation of the rite to a melting mountain. Around the sanctuary, dances and processions run continuously, comparsas in costume performing for the Lord. It is one of the largest Andean-Christian pilgrimages in the Americas, and it is physically and spiritually demanding in equal measure.