The Great Journey

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[ The Village of the Last Incas ]

Q'ero village is located two valleys away from Cusco. It was in 1981 that I visited this village for the first time. At that time the villagers would not welcome me. Some yelled at me and threw stones and potatoes at me, telling me to go out on the 10th day. I even thought "I will never come back here," yet I could not give up the chance to visit a village where people still lived in the same manner as in the time of the Incas. I went back there in the following year and the year after that. The once cold attitude of the villagers suddenly changed after I helped in the rite of cutting hair of one child. It has been 10 years since I first visited them and the present visit was made after 5 years' absence.

The people at the foot of the mountain say "Q'ero is not the kind of place people can live. It's for hares." But the Quechua people in Q'ero village have been living on this barren land in the Andes since long before the Age of Incaic Empires. The secret is in their lifestyle of making use of the lands at different altitudes. At the altitude of 4000 m, they keep alpacas and llamas. At 3000m they raise potatoes, and at 1500m corn. They have houses at these three locations and use llamas to carry the load up and down the slopes between. In the Andes, nomads live in the upland and farmers live in the lowland area, exchanging meat and rock salt with agricultural products. Yet in Q'ero village, they have been leading self-sufficient lives, making use of the different altitudes over 3000m. This must have helped them keeping the tradition from the Incaic Empire, thus making Q'ero the village of the last Incas.