by Infoguide Penny Williams

My visit to Ayaviri, Peru, is well-timed: I’m able to join the 4-day field trip to Colca Valley, organized by Michaela Novotna and the other instructors for their art-restoration students.

(Quick background: I spent the first two weeks of December 2016 visiting former P&D volunteer Michaela Novotna in Ayaviri, Puno Region, Peru, where she is the only non-Peruvian member of the team working on an art restoration project centred around the city’s colonial-era cathedral. For more, see the two previous posts published here, starting on January 13, and continuing here on January 23.)

Colca Valley in neighbouring Arequipa Region has wonderful colonial-era (“Andean Baroque”) churches, all restored during a comprehensive program earlier this century. This valley is the “After” to the Puno Region “Before,” where so little has been done.

We arrive in Chivay, main town of the valley, where it’s fiesta time: three days celebrating both the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, and the valley’s rich Quechua-Ayamara culture. Wititi dancers twirl through the main plaza.

We’re staying in neighbouring Achoma, in a former work camp repurposed as a conference and training centre. I catch Michaela stretched out on the wall early one morning, already warmed internally by a first cup of coffee, now warming her exterior in the sunshine.

We visit some eight or nine churches in all, usually accompanied by the Peruvian who led the long restoration program. The exteriors are always blazing white — here, for example, in Yanque —

and the interiors layer-on-layer of colour and detail. Here again,Yanque, and a glimpse of the high altar.

The same exterior-interior contrast elsewhere — here, in Lari. 

Did you notice the long crack running down that left-hand bell tower? We’re in earthquake country …

 Again, the opulent interior. And, sometimes, utterly simple details as well — here framing the doorway to the Lari baptismal alcove.

I said this was earthquake country. Proof in Ichupampa, hit by another quake in August 2016.

The church is now locked away behind a chain-link fence. No clarity about when it may be again restored. Padre Miguel stares at it a long time, shakes his head.

We meet another lock-out in Canocota. No earthquake this time — but no priest or open door or available key, either. Just a little burro trotting up and down the length of the plaza. Trot-trot. Trot-trot. Trot-trot-trot.

Back to Chivay, into the mercado. Michaela has the shopping lists; we divide into teams of Useful Arms To Carry Things; and an hour or so later, we have all the supplies we need for our final-night bonfire — corn and sweet potatoes cooked in the embers, meat grilled over livelier flames.

Next morning, back to Ayaviri. Then hop-hop-hop for me: back to Cusco, back to Lima, and home to Toronto.

For more information:

* Email Michaela at [email protected] – she’d love to hear from you.

* Visit my own blog, where I did longer, more detailed posts about this trip; go to https://icelandpenny.wordpress.com and scroll back to the first post, dated 4 December 2016.