The Battle of Sangarará

A shortened version of this story is also available on BBC Travel: The indigenous rebellion that inspired Peru’s independence.

July 28th, 2021 was the bicentennial of Peruvian independence from Spain. To get into the celebratory mood, I went to the village of Sangarará, where Peruvians won their first victory against the Spanish army in 1780. The battle sparked movements for independence in several other countries and is credited as being the start of a new era in South America. I traveled with my friend Steve and his friend Rodolfo by bus about three hours south of Cusco. Rodolfo’s mother is from Sangarará and he grew up in the village. His family still owns the same house, though most of them live in Cusco now, only visiting the countryside on the weekends.

Steve and I went to get the story of the battle of Sangarará and came away with a whole web of interconnected stories. The town itself has a long history of rebellions. The first was the battle we came for, in 1780. There was a repeat rebellion that followed the same pattern in 1929. We spoke with a village elder who was jailed after another uprising in 1942. We also got eyewitness accounts of digging up the mass graves from 1780. There is the story of Tomasa Tito Condemayta, who led the battle of 1780 but has been completely erased from history. Then there is history going back before the Spanish invasion. We heard accounts of forbidden love and betrayal in the Inca’s own family. The strangest story we found was about two mummies who were discovered in a cave near town, which have since disappeared. All this in a town not far from Cusco, on your way to the pre-Inca ruins of Waqra Pukará.  

Mayor Gregorio Cruz Machaki

The mayor welcomed us to Sangarará and spent an hour telling us about the battle, then called several village elders so that we could interview them also.

The mayor Gregorio Cruz Machaki afforded us over an hour of his time the day we arrived and arranged visits with the most knowledgeable village elders, as well as the caretaker for the church, Marta Esperanza Pacheco. There were some facts about 1780 that nobody in town agreed on, such as how many Spanish died in the battle. However, everybody agreed that only three Spaniards survived the battle, and everybody knew their names. Also, everybody agreed that the person who got credit for winning the battle didn’t even get there until everything was over. This was the most interesting part for me.

The ones who escaped

While I was photographing the church, this tyke came over to check that I knew the three Spainards who escaped from this window were named Escalante, Gamarra and Mujica. He wasn’t the only one in town to ensure that I would remember those who escaped.

The basic facts of the battle that we got from the mayor are this: José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera was both a local cacique in the Spanish system of government and a descendent of Inca royalty. He changed his name to Túpac Amaru when he became more active in defending the Andean people against the Spanish. In early 1780, he traveled to Lima to formally petition the Spanish viceroyalty to enforce humane treatment of Andean workers. Most of Peru had by then been granted to Spanish hacendados, who owned the land and everything and everybody on it. The Andeans were slaves in the sense that they were owned and had to work for the Spanish, although they could not be bought and sold as slaves brought from Africa were. This made Andeans financially worthless, and many were worked to death. Among the inhumane practices that Tupác was protesting was the branding of Andeans by their Spanish owners.

The Spanish viceroyalty ignored Túpac Amaru, who then turned to robbing the tax collector, a Spaniard named Antonio de Arriaga who taxed the Andean workers, then took the money to the Spanish in Cusco. This Robin Hood redistribution of taxes back to the poor was also ignored by the Spanish. It wasn’t until Túpac hung the tax collector that he finally got some attention. Throughout this process, Túpac had been organizing his own army in secret, getting ready for battle against the Spanish. One of his generals, Tomasa Tito Condemayta, who the villagers affectionately call Tomasa, was originally from the town of Acos. However, she was such a good strategist that he posted her in the crucial town of Sangarará, along with her troops.

In response to the execution of the tax collector, the Spanish sent a force from Cusco to capture Túpac Amaru. As soon as the soldiers were sighted approaching Sangarará on the afternoon of November 17th, Tomasa sent a messenger to Túpac, asking him to come quickly from the town of Tungasuca with the rest of the army. The Spanish soldiers camped in the hills above Sangarará that night. When dawn broke on the 18th Túpac was still on the way, though of course the Spanish didn’t know this. They came down into town at first light, calling the townspeople to the main square. The leaders asked where Túpac was, telling the villagers that they should hand him over, that he should show himself. 

One brave villager told the Spanish that they didn’t know where he was and wouldn’t hand him over even if they did. He was promptly shot for his outburst. The villagers started throwing rocks at the Spanish, who retreated into the church, which was directly behind them on the main square. Tomasa decided to keep them pinned down in the church until Túpac and the rest of the army arrived. She asked villagers to bring straw and dried ichu grass, making a ring of fires around the church.

Initially, the fires did the trick; the Spanish stayed in the church. However, a stray spark or bit of burning straw was blown up onto the thatch roof of the church, which quickly spread flames across the whole roof of the church. Sparks from this fire started to fall down on the Spanish inside, landing also on the magazine of gun powder that the Spanish had brought to use against the Andeans. The explosion killed all but three Spanish and destroyed the apse and the alter, even blowing down the main arch which supported the adobe structure over the transepts from inside.

When Túpac Amaru arrived with his army, the Spanish were already dead. 

There are several versions of how the church burned. According to some, the church was purposefully burned. Others claim that the Spanish themselves caused the fire. In each version, the people of Sangarará are clear that Tomasa was the general in charge of the battle and that Túpac arrived after the battle was over. Wikipedia and education history videos made in Peru all claim that Túpac was responsible for the battle and never even mention Tomasa.

Calle Condemayta

One of the main streets in town , Calle Condemayta reminds villagers how important Tomasa is in the story of their hometown.

We wanted to see where the battle took place and went to find Marta Esperanza Pacheco. Esperanza has been the caretaker for this church for over forty years. She’s a thin woman, bent with age although she has jet black hair that she says isn’t dyed. The mayor arranged for her to open the church for us, even though it was a Monday evening, and the priest wasn’t in town. She was reluctant at first, until Rodolfo started to reminisce with her about going to school with her daughters and the trouble they used to get into as children. Chatting with Rodolfo, she led us across the plaza to the church and used what looked like a car key fob to disarm an alarm system. The massive wooden doors have a smaller door cut out of one of them and she unlocked this smaller one, ducking into the church to turn on the lights.

One by one, we stooped down to enter the church, pausing to let our eyes adjust to the dim light inside. The adobe walls are over two meters thick at the base, and the only windows are high up where the walls are thinner. We got the full tour, starting with the adobe archway that supports the high roof over the altar. Restoration has recently begun on the arch to reveal the frescoes painted there over 200 years ago. The arch was destroyed in the explosion of the gun powder but was rebuilt immediately afterwards. The rest of the church survived the blast.

There is a small room opposite the main door, like another transept halfway down the nave. She didn’t unlock the doors, but pulled a curtain aside so we could peer through the intricate wooden lattice. The room was full of tools and boxes of labeled artifacts. Lacking a museum, the town keeps the most important archeological finds locked in the church. No wonder they have an alarm on this place, I thought to myself.

“The baptism room is where the Spanish escaped out the window, wearing Saints’ clothes,” Esperanza told us gravely. I thought I must have misunderstood her. 

“The three Spanish who escaped were wearing clothes they took off the statues?” I asked.

“Yes. What a sacrilege to take clothes off the Saints!” She sounded indignant. “Some of the villagers saw them crawl out of the window and thought that the explosion was so destructive that even the Saints were leaving the church. That’s how the Spanish escaped,” she added. “The villagers would have captured them if they had been sure that they were soldiers.”

While her stories of the battle were exactly what we had come for, the next part was much more intriguing.

“I was already caretaker when restoration work was started here in the 1980s,” Esperanza started. “First, they removed all of the cracked flagstones on the floor to replace them with new stones. That’s when we found out that nobody had buried the Spanish who died here. They just put some dirt on top and laid stones over all the bodies. They weren’t intact skeletons. It was just a jumble of bones. There were arms and legs all over the place. The gun powder explosion must have blown them all to pieces.”

I wondered what the church must have smelled like those first few months as the burned bodies of the soldiers started to decompose under only a light layer of dirt. Did the villagers start church services again as soon as the arch was rebuilt? Did the high altitude and cold, dry air prevent the rotting bodies from smelling too badly? Why would the villagers want to afford the Spanish the honor of staying inside the church? I figured that either they just didn’t want to touch the bodies, or they thought the Spanish should remain inside the church that they were forcing on all South America. Maybe both.

“Town hall used to be right next to the church, but when they were doing restoration in the late 80s they demolished the building and built a new one across the plaza,” Esperanza continued. “They dug up the ground around the church and found that the bodies of the villagers who died were buried all around. They weren’t in a jumbled pile like the Spanish, though. They were laid out neatly and there was one body near the door of the church that I’ll never forget. It was much taller than the other Andeans and wore expertly woven alpaca cloth. He must have been royalty. Maybe he was from the Inca’s family.”

Our next stop was to meet Don Enrique, who the mayor had assured us knew more about the battle than any of the other villagers. Enrique Arnedo Oimas is 84 years old and was born in Sangarará. When we first arrived at his house, he and Rodolfo reminisced about how Rodolfo’s father used to work with Don Enrique. When there was a pause in their conversation, I jumped in to ask about the battle. Don Enrique started his story with the reasons that the indigenous people needed Tupac Amaru to defend them from the Spanish.

Don Enrique and his wife Alejandrina pose in their home’s patio. They carry most of Sangarará’s history with them.

“The Spanish took our land,” he began. “Tupac Amaru saw how the indigenous people were forced to work for the Spanish dawn to dusk, twelve hours every day. He saw the exploitation, the abuse, and the branding. This is what made him react, what made him start to organize. That’s why he hung Arriaga, the tax collector. When the Spanish sent the army from Cusco to Sangarará, it was the children who saw them first. The children were in the mountains watching their sheep when they saw the army coming. They ran to town to tell Tomasa that the soldiers were coming. When the Spanish came, all of the people came to fight. Men, women, children, everybody was armed with rocks and farming tools.”

Most of what we heard from Don Enrique coincided with what we had heard from the mayor about the battle. He also knew the names of the three Spanish who escaped: Gamarra, Escalante and Mujica. The biggest difference with what we heard from Don Enrique was that 1,500 Spanish soldiers died. I pressed him on this a bit since we had heard 800 from the mayor and 500 from Esperanza. Don Enrique was firm, yes there were 1,500 Spanish soldiers who died. He also knew what Tomasa said to the villagers in Quechua.

“Llaqtamasicuna hamuychi,” prompted Rodolfo. “Is that how she called the villagers together?”

“Sangarará llaqta! Warmicuna, caricuna, quiracuna, wawacuna! Hamuychis paccantin q’opantin!” Don Enrique called out. I know enough Quechua to know that llaqta is town, warmi is woman, wawa is child and the suffix cuna makes a noun plural. Hamuy means come but I can’t translate the rest of the second sentence. Don Enrique continued in Quechua for a couple more sentences, quoting Tomasa, but the only other words I could pick out were the words for “bring” and “ichu,” which is the bunch grass that grows all over this high altitude prairie. At that point I asked him to go back to Spanish for me.

“After the church burned and all of the Spanish were dead, except for the three who escaped through the window in the baptism room and went to Acomayo, that’s when Túpac Amaru arrived.” I had to stop him again, this time to ask how everybody knows the names of the three who escaped and how we know that they went to Acomayo.

“Because they’re still there,” he said. “Those three families are still in Acomayo?” I asked. 

“Yes. Did you walk down Garcilaso street?” he asked. “That’s where they buried the Spanish. They were all ‘chicharron,’ just bones. All 1,500 were buried there.” This wasn’t quite what we had heard from Esperanza and I was more inclined to believe her on this part.

“Túpac was blamed for the deaths of all of the Spanish. They told him that if he had turned himself in, that the Spanish troops wouldn’t have had to chase him and wouldn’t have died. He tried to hide, but they found him and took him prisoner to Cusco. They tortured him, then had him drawn and quartered and sent pieces of him to all of the villages in the area as a warning.”

“Do you know anything about Tomasa from before this battle? Are there any stories about what she did before or after the battle?” I was a lot more interested in her life than in Túpac’s death.

“There were two battles before Sangarará. She led the battle at the Pilpintu bridge and at Acos. That’s why Túpac sent her to Sangarará, because she was a good leader and strategist at those two battles. Her strategy for keeping the Spanish in the church was good too. She was the heroine of the battle.” 

I was out of questions about the battle and asked Don Enrique if there was anything else he wanted to tell me. This turned out to be the money question. He said that there were so many more stories about the town. I asked if he wanted to tell us any of these stories and he was so excited he started speaking rapid-fire Quechua. Rodolfo helped me bring him back to Spanish, though he continued to use the word “misti” for the Spanish. He alternately called the local people “indio” and “andino.” The stories that followed explained that Sangarará has always been rebellious, and we got two more stories about the townspeople resisting authority. This first story started in 1929 and went through 1930.

“The misti used to beat us with sticks,” he started. “There are Spanish families still here. There are Spanish families in all of Peru. Even in Sangarará and Acomayo there are Spanish who stayed here. They’ve always been abusive. The authorities have always been mistis. The town government and landowners they were always Spanish.

Most residents of Sangarará still farm their fields by hand as they have for generations.

“Oy, ven tú. You will work in my fields, all day,” he called out, mocking a Spanish accent. “They made us work all day, without food, without drink. They were the authorities. We had to obey, even after the battle. Why did we have to work for them? They didn’t pay us, but we would be punished if we didn’t obey them. They were always abusive. How could we protest this abuse?  How could we go to Lima to ask for justice? We didn’t have money. We had potatoes and alpacas. But we did it. We pooled together all our money and sent Marcelino Jaliri to Lima to protest the abuse.

“There were very few mistis and so many indigenous Andeans. While Marcelino was in Lima, we captured all of the mistis and we put them in jail. There used to be a jail on the main plaza, next to where the school is now. Then we took them to Acomayo. They did the same in Pumacanchi, in Acomayo, in Chicuani, putting the Spanish in jail. The authorities are in Lima, so how could we get justice from them? We told the mistis that this isn’t their land and that they should go back to Spain. We are the children of the sun and this is our land. We are going to govern our land. We beat them with sticks the way they used to do to us.

“The president of the republic heard what we were doing, and he sent Marcelino back to us. The president said that we had to stop killing the Spanish. When Marcelino came back from Lima, he asked us what we had done. What had we been doing while he as in Lima? He said that he went to get justice for us, and he was angry that we had been capturing and beating the Spanish to death while he was gone. He was worried that he would have to go back to Lima and that he would be punished for what his people had done.

“When he went back to Lima, he was imprisoned in the San Pedro tower and burned to death. 

“We’ve always been rebels here. We’ve always confronted authority. The last rebellion was in 1942. Some Spanish wanted to mine in the hills above town. The governor told the villagers that somebody would come to take this land and start mining. The people were so sad. The next day the villagers saw vehicles coming. Back then there was only one truck that came from Cusco to Acomayo once per day. Cars weren’t common then. 

“The people were surprised to see the vehicles and ran to the church to ring the bells. Everybody came running to see what the problem was. It was the Farfán family coming to take our land. We all know the Farfán family. There were three of them that day, three brothers. We captured them and put them in jail, in the same jail where we put the Spanish in 1929.

“People came with rocks and with sticks to beat them, to kill them. The authorities wouldn’t let the villagers in the jail. They wanted to wait until police arrived from Cusco to take the three brothers away. When the police arrived, the people were angry. There were only two police, but they put the Farfán brothers in their truck to take them to Acomayo.

“The villagers knew that the police would protect the three brothers because they were Spanish. They knew that if they got to Acomayo, they would be set free. So, they ran ahead of the truck, on a shortcut up through the hills. The piled stones in the road and made a roadblock. So many people came, and the police and brothers got out of the truck. One of the police escaped and ran to Acomayo. The others were taken prisoner. They stripped the uniform off the police officer and took his gun. They even took his shoes so he couldn’t run.

“They took the police back to Sangarará and put him in Ismael Puente’s house where they could guard him. We rang the church bell to call everybody to the plaza. People were running everywhere and saying that we were going to burn the police into chicharron like Tomasa did with the Spanish.

“I was a kid when this happened and I was afraid. My father was part misti but we fought with the villagers, with the andinos. I listened to people say that they were going to burn all of the mistis. They were going to get their own justice because the authorities wouldn’t give indigenous people justice. 

“At 10:00 at night the military came to release our prisoners and they started shooting. They killed some of us. They captured the rest of us and the next day took us away. A few people escaped into the mountains, but they took all the men, including me and my father. I was only twelve years old. They said I was to be interrogated as a witness. They took some people to Cusco but I was taken to Urcos, which is closer than Cusco.

“They kept us in jail for four days. I was in the same cement cell as everybody. After a few days they let some people go, including my father, but they kept me. We were all tied up. It was cold and muddy, and we all got lice. It smelled terrible. I cried so much. I was afraid without my father. One by one, they took us away for questioning. I could hear the Spanish beating my people, threatening them to make them talk. People said all kinds of things, most of it not true.

“I was so afraid they would torture me too. I heard people getting beaten. The others in the cell with me told me to not say anything. They told me to say that I hadn’t seen anything. They said that I wouldn’t be tortured because I was a child. 

“That’s what I did. I said that I didn’t see anything. They didn’t hurt me, and they let me go.

“From that day on, police refuse to be posted here. We haven’t had a national police force in Sangarará since that rebellion against the Farfán brothers. We had some civil guards, just to keep the peace, but no police or military would come here.

“My father’s generation grew up with so much violence, so much abuse. They only knew how to react with violence. I was lucky. After the rebellion in 1942 the town was more peaceful. The authorities left us alone and I grew up with less violence than my parents.”

My jaw had dropped open when Don Enrique said that he had been jailed as a witness at twelve years old. I finally closed my mouth and waited to see if he had any more stories for us. He didn’t let us go without first telling us that he wants to register a complaint. He hopes that our article will be read in Peru and that it will cause a stir. He complains that the Peruvian government doesn’t recognize Nov 18 as holiday, as a historic day.

“Chile and Bolivia started their independence movement because of Sangarará. The government has started to make a museum of Tomasa’s house, but they stopped the construction. I don’t know if they will ever finish it. Our elected officials say they’ll do something, but they never do. This is an important place, but it has been forgotten.”

He then said that was all and stood up. Rodolfo found his cane, helped him stand and walk across the yard to see us out the gate to the street. His wife had been sitting quietly in the yard nearby, peeling potatoes throughout the interview. I wished I knew more Quechua so that I could talk with her. We thanked Don Enrique profusely and walked by the church on our way back to Rodolfo’s house.

With these three rebellions, 1780, 1929 and 1942 I wonder how many more we have lost track of. How many rebellions were there between 1780 and 1929? Is there anybody alive who knows those stories? Is there somewhere we could dig through archives and find them? It’s hard to believe that such a feisty town would go 149 years without some kind of uprising.

Our next mission was to find Tomasa’s house. It turns out to be only two blocks from the main plaza, but the whole area was walled off as a construction zone. We walked up the hill behind her house to get a better look down on the place. Rodolfo informed us that this was the hill that Tomasa climbed to call out to the villagers to bring straw to the church for the fires that eventually killed the Spanish. I tried to imagine this small town as an even smaller village, two hundred and forty years ago.

Looking down into the construction zone, we could see the outline of a house, as if the only thing left was the foundation. There were also several sheds, which I assumed were full of tools. However, Rodolfo said that the Ministry of Culture has been excavating here and has found a lot of artifacts. Hopefully, some of those are over 200 years old, maybe even from when Tomasa lived there.

So much of this story is missing. How did she come to be in a leadership role for the battles before Sangarará? How did she train the women and men who were under her command? Were there any challenges to her leadership or did the Andeans easily accept her as a leader? I can’t help feeling that she was purposefully erased from history. She’s not even mentioned in the Wikipedia version of the battle. It must have been bad enough for the Spanish to admit that they were routed by a group of villages armed with farming tools. It would have been so much worse to admit that an indigenous woman led that defeat.

According to Rodolfo’s mother, Tomasa did have children, who were killed with her in Cusco. The Spanish cut her tongue out and made her watch as they killed her children before killing her.

All this makes me question what I’ve learned about the battle of Puebla, when a group of Mexican farmers defeated Napoleon’s army on May 5th 1862. Amid the modern celebrations and tequila shots for Cinco de Mayo in the US, what have we lost? Were there any women who played a big part in the battle and were subsequently erased from history, just like Tomasa? Did Ignacio Zaragoza deserve all the credit as history has recorded? Túpac Amaru gets all the credit in official accounts of this battle, though everybody in town was very clear that he didn’t arrive until the Spanish were all chicharron. How many important leaders have been erased from history because the men recording events didn’t think that women should have political or military power?

Hoping to find some answers to these questions, we went to meet the last person that the mayor had arranged for us to interview. Epifanio Huaman Ccolcca is originally from Acomayo and moved to Sangarará in 1979. He has served in a wide variety of roles in the community, including community secretary, and president of the agricultural association. He was a justice of the peace for six years and is now the local president for the government’s pension association.

“As a child in school I learned about the battle of Sangarará but never in depth and the teachers came from other towns. They taught that Tomasa Tito Condemayta came from Acos and organized the population but especially other women from Acomayo, Acos and Pilpintu. She gathered women together and trained them in Sangarará to fight the Spanish. She coordinated closely with Túpac and the troops he was organizing. They traveled on the Q’apaq Ñan, [the road system built by the Inca], from town to town. Tupac was also a merchant and saw the conditions that people were living in because he traveled the area selling basics like food and tools. He traveled with a dozen mules from town to town.”

He didn’t have much else to say about the battle, so I asked if he knew anything about the rebellions in 1929 or 1942. He didn’t, but he wanted to tell us about the work he did not long after he moved to Sangarará.

“I witnessed the bones in the church because I was part of the restoration work. Bones were found of those who were died trapped in the church. They weren’t buried. They were left how they were after the explosion. I know they were Spanish because their bones were bigger. We Andeans are short, and our femurs are shorter. I also witnessed that the baptism room was the only part of the church completely intact from before the explosion. The window in that room is where the three Spanish escaped from. But most of the church was intact after the explosion. The walls were damaged, but they are several meters thick adobe. They’re solid. This is the original church. They had to repair some after the battle but when we started restoration, it was clear that most of the church had some damage, and some walls were burned. The arch above the altar fell but most of the church is original. There is still a lot of restoration to do. It’s only about half done. The community wants it finished because we want to start promoting it for tourism, but the Ministry of Culture works too slowly. It has been decades and they are still working so slowly. The community has submitted proposals for how we can finish the work, but they won’t let us. It started in 1985 and they have worked on it in parts.”

He agrees with Esperanza that the Spanish were buried in the church and the Andeans were buried outside but he didn’t see any Andean skeletons that seemed special or different from the others. Inside the church the bones were piled up in a mess but outside the skeletons were intact like they were buried in a grave. One thing he told us gave me pause.

“I saw two skulls with trepanation. One had the holes covered with copper.” As far as I knew, trepanation, drilling or cutting holes in the skull of a living person, was common in ancient Peru, around 3,500 B.C. How was it possible that the village still practiced trepanation in the 1700s? National Geographic explains that trepanation was still practiced “in Peru between the 14th and 16th centuries A.D.” Why was trepanation so prevalent in Peru? It was usually in response to a skull fracture that needed medical attention. “The weapons they used in war were primarily sling stones and bashing clubs, things that would cause fractures to the head, whereas in many other parts of the world, the weapons were bows and arrows or swords and spears. Those things don’t cause the frequency of head wounds that bashing weapons and sling stones do.”

The last story Epifanio had for us was about forbidden love during Inca times. He told us briefly about Tita Cosnipa, who was the Inca’s bodyguard. Though many people use the word Inca to refer to all of the citizens of what is now called Peru, the Inca was the leader of those people. Tita Cosnipa fell in love with the Inca’s daughter and the two eloped, hiding in caves near Sangarará. Eventually, they fled to Waqra Pukará and were captured there.

This led us to a visit to Waqra Pukará. Rodolfo asked his cousin Nair if she would accompany Steve and I on the hike. Nair isn’t a guide, but she grew up in Sangarará and often hiked in the area with her mother, trading vegetables from town with corn grown in the mountains near Waqra Pukará. Rodolfo arranged for somebody to drive us up to the trailhead, which is only a half hour drive, but the road gains a lot of altitude in that half hour. The ride saved us over two hours walking, and we started on the trail just after 6 a.m. It was a cloudy morning, and the ground was covered with frost.

The first part of the trail is gentle rolling hills, crossing a plateau at about 14,000 feet. We saw caracara falcons soaring through the morning mist and vicuña, the wild cousins of the llama, disappearing over the top of a hill. We were far above treeline and the only vegetation is bunchgrass. There were a few ponds with ducks, far below the trail but it was still too early for alpaca to have been let out to graze yet. After two hours hiking across the top, we descended about half an hour into a canyon, went around a corner and were presented with Waqra Pukará. The horned outcropping of stone has terraces and carvings dating back to pre-Inca times. It was designed as a ceremonial place and there are other ruins along the canyon that show where people would have lived in the area.

When we arrived we saw a group who had camped nearby the night before, which is what I plan to do when I’m able to go back. They were already climbing up the stairs to the archeological site. The cliffs around Waqra Pukará are only broken in one place by steps that were built pre-Inca. There were two guardians at the bottom of the stairs, who informed us that the place is still closed due to the pandemic. However, since we had walked so far to get there, they would allow us to visit the site for fifteen minutes after the current group left. It turned out that fifteen minutes just meant less than an hour.

When it was our turn, we ducked under the sign that read “Prohibido el Ingreso,” which can be translated as “Entry Forbidden.” One of the guardians stayed down by the steps, but the other accompanied us up, pointing out all kinds of things that we might have not otherwise noticed. He showed us stones that had been used to grind herbs, he said for ceremonial purposes, since people didn’t live here, and normal cooking wouldn’t have been common. While he was leading us to see a formation naturally shaped like a condor, he looked over the edge and pointed out a real condor, soaring far below, deep in the canyon.

We only stayed a few hours, since we needed to leave around noon. We wanted to get back to the trailhead before 3:00, since the weather often deteriorates in the afternoons. On the walk back we saw caracara falcons and vicuña in about the same places as we had in the morning. It was cold and windy by the time we reached the trailhead and we got in the car as the rain started to fall.

Post script:

Rodolfo remembered as a child seeing a mummy peering out of a window in town hall and asked everybody we interviewed if they knew what had happened to it. Mayor Cruz, Don Enrique and Epifanio all told him that there were actually two mummies, found by a local guy in some caves on the peak above town. All three said that the mummies had been given to the high school when the old town hall was demolished in the 1980s and rebuilt on the other side of the plaza. They said that they were given to the high school to be studied but that they were never registered with the Ministry of Culture or catalogued by archeologists. We weren’t able to find anybody to let us in the high school, which has been closed since the pandemic started. For now, we don’t know if those two mummies are still in the high school.

Another disaster caused by the pandemic

One morning in Sangarará, I heard music and went out in the street with my camera to see what was happening. I took a few photos before I realized there was a casket in the procession. Asking neighbors that day, I learned that it was a funeral for a 14 year old boy. Since schools were closed for the pandemic, he had gone to Puerto Maldonado to work in the mines. His body was sent back without any explanation for his family about how he died.

Thank you Steve!

Steve Hirst has been a great mentor as I transition from teaching to writing. I am so thankful that he pitched the BBC with this article, which also gave me the opportunity to publish photos on BBC Travel.