El Chaccu

The “Chaccu” is the mainly festivity of the country of Pampas Galeras, near the Peruvian city of Ayacucho, in the Andes. It is every year on the 24th of June and takes 3 days. There are two more chaccus along the year, in July and in August. Exactly it means to drive the “vicunas”, a kind of lama’s family and to leave them in a round protected area, with the objective to choose them one by one to shave their wool.

We spend all day there. We woke up at 5 o’clock in the morning to arrive to the mountains at 10 o’clock and to see all process. It was very cold and somebody had seasickness because of the altitude. It was very exciting to know Andinian women dressed with traditional clothes cooking lamas among the rocks. After the chaccu, furthermore there was an Inca ceremony, in which tourism students danced in circle among vicunas to make a payment to the God Apu. Chaccu is a way to conserve animals and to permit its ecological use for Andinian population, moreover the biological conservation of natural resources, like an example of local wildlife.