Key takeaways
- The floor is farmed and the Jalqa are the community whose land this is.
- A palette almost without other colour, which alone sets the textiles apart in the Andes.
- Imagined animals filling the cloth without a horizon, depicting an underworld rather than an ordered surface.
- The weaving had nearly disappeared by the 1970s and was deliberately brought back.
Who the Jalqa are
A Quechua-speaking people of the highlands north-west of Sucre, farming land that includes the Maragua formation. The name describes a cultural and geographical grouping rather than a single village.
Their presence changes what the crater is. A landform this strange might be expected to be uninhabited, and instead there are houses on the floor of it, fields, animals, paths and a school. It is worked ground.
That is worth carrying into the day. You are walking through somewhere people live, not across an exhibit.
What makes the weaving different
Andean textile traditions are among the richest in the world and most of them share certain habits: bands of colour, geometric organisation, symmetry, a clear sense of up and down.
Jalqa weaving does almost none of that. It is worked in red and black with very little else, and instead of bands and symmetry it presents a dense field of figures with no horizon and no obvious order.
Standing in front of a piece for the first time, most visitors read it as chaotic. That reading is correct and it is deliberate.
It also breaks a rule that most textile traditions anywhere observe, which is that cloth is organised. Stripes, borders, repeats and mirrored halves are close to universal in weaving because they follow naturally from how a loom works. Producing a field with none of them takes deliberate effort against the grain of the technique.
Red and black cloth, dense with figures and without a horizon
Khurus, and the world underneath
The figures are khurus: animals, but not animals anyone has seen. They have too many limbs, wrong heads, bodies that turn into other bodies, and they are scattered across the cloth at every angle rather than standing on a ground line.
What the textiles depict is the ukhu pacha, the inner or lower world, which in Andean cosmology is not hell but the realm of the uncontrolled and the generative. It is a place without the order of the surface world, and the weaving represents it accordingly.
So the disorder is the subject. A tidier textile would be a less accurate one, and once that is explained the cloth stops looking chaotic and starts looking precise.
How a piece is made
On a horizontal ground loom, staked out, with the weaver working seated. The technique is warp-faced, which means the pattern is carried in the lengthways threads and the weaver picks them up individually to build the figures.
There is no cartoon or drawing to follow. The composition is held in the head and built as it goes, which is why no two pieces are the same and why the figures vary from weaver to weaver.
A substantial piece takes months of intermittent work around farming and household labour. Weaving is not a full-time occupation here and never has been.
Watching it done is the thing that converts most visitors. The threads are picked up individually, by hand, without a pattern to consult, and a figure emerges from what looked a moment earlier like an undifferentiated field of red. It is slow in a way that is difficult to convey and obvious once seen.
A tradition that nearly went
By the 1970s the weaving was close to disappearing. Mass-produced cloth, migration and the ordinary pressures on subsistence farming had made it uneconomic, and the number of weavers still working the old designs had fallen sharply.
It was brought back deliberately, through work in the 1980s that documented surviving pieces, found weavers who still held the technique, and built a market that made the work worth doing again.
That is why the textiles a visitor sees today are a revival rather than an unbroken line, and it is not a criticism. A tradition that was rescued is more interesting than one that was never threatened.
Meeting a weaver on this tour
If one is available, the tour includes time with her and an explanation of the work. The operator describes it as conditional rather than guaranteed, which is the honest way to describe an arrangement with someone who has her own day.
When it happens it is frequently the part of the trip people talk about afterwards. Having the figures explained by the person making them turns a piece of cloth into a document.
If it does not happen, nothing else about the day changes.
Where else to see the textiles
Sucre has a textile museum devoted to the weaving of this region, including the Jalqa and the neighbouring Tarabuco tradition, which is worth an hour or two and makes an excellent companion to this trek.
Seeing the museum first and the crater second is the better order if you have the choice, because the museum teaches you how to look and the crater shows you where it comes from.
Pieces can be bought, and buying from the weaver or from the organisations that support them puts the money where it belongs.
If you do buy, ask what the piece is and who made it. A weaver or a cooperative will tell you both without hesitation, which is itself the most useful test available to a visitor who cannot judge the work by eye.
