Thousands of Peruvian pilgrims attend Snow Star Festival
Thousands of Peruvian pilgrims attend Snow Star Festival
Rodrigo Abd, Associated Press
Updated 9:02 am, Friday, June 3, 2016
SINAKARA VALLEY, Peru (AP) — Tens of thousands of pilgrims crowd an Andean valley, with dancers in multi-layered skirts and musicians with drums and flutes performing non-stop over three days. The native melodies resound throughout a snow-capped mountain range long adored by the Quechua people.
Known as the Snow Star festival, the gathering is held every year shortly before the Christian feast of Corpus Christi and draws as many as 100,000 people to the Quispicanchis province in Peru's Cuzco region. It also coincides with the reappearance of the star cluster Pleiades in the Southern Hemisphere, signaling the abundance of the harvest season.
Inscribed on UNESCO'S Intangible Cultural Heritage list, the festival features a pilgrimage by local people to the sanctuary where a boulder features an image of Jesus Christ known as the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i (pronounced KOL-yer REE-chee), or Snow Star in the Quechua language.
The sanctuary is in the Sinakara Valley at the base of the Qullqip'unqu mountain in the Andes. Parish churches in the area provide food for the pilgrims, who camp out in the valley.
The celebration mixing Roman Catholic and indigenous beliefs honors Jesus as well as the area's glacier, which is considered sacred among some indigenous people. While the native celebration is far older, the Christian part of the ritual stretches back to the 1700s, when Jesus is said to have appeared to a young shepherd in the form of another boy.
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In recent years, the pilgrims have noted a decline in the size of the glacier because of warming trends. In hopes of preventing additional melting, the ukukus no longer use the large candles that were once common in the ritual. The ukukus also used to cut away ice cubes to bring down, but no longer do so.
Jose Luis Mamani, president of the Paucartambo, one of numerous "nations" making the pilgrimage, said members of his group "are very worried about the state of this sacred place."
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