Chapter · Ecuador · Legends
The volcanoes are lords
What Quito's festivals keep from before 1534
In 1534 Spaniards arrived in a country that already had its festivals, its inhabited mountains and its calendar. Nothing was erased: it was covered over, and what lies beneath still comes up every year in the streets of Quito. This path draws on Ecuadorian scholarship rather than on travellers' eyes.
Context first
A lesson to read before the others, to set the scene.
- The place
- The era
- The people
The lessons in this chapter
- 1The volcanoes are lordsVolcanoes are not scenery but lords, and the definition is geographical first: they are the summits from which the lines deciding where water goes run out. Two of them erased an entire settlement.9 min
- 2Two metres tall, carried from insideAn Inca princess two metres tall, in reed and wood, carried from inside by a man watching through a window cut in her body, at the centre of a Catholic procession. Nothing is hidden: nothing is stated either.9 min
- 3The dance that reclaims the streetA Kichwa word meaning sorcerer, which the colony stretched to cover every forest people. And a dance ending in a played death, negotiated between families, which serves to take back a neighbourhood's street.9 min
How these lessons are written
Each lesson starts from first-hand sources: Wikisource, Gallica, Persée, archives, museums and institutes. A fact without a source does not get written, and every lesson lists its own as direct links.
The rhythm
A lesson is five minutes of cards and four questions. Those questions then come back the next day, then at 3, 7, 21 and 60 days, and that return is what makes it stick. One a day is enough, and you can do several in a row.