Q'eros: the Andean nation that walks 14 hours to sow dreams at Qoyllur Rit'i

To reach the foot of the glacier, the Q'eros walk for 14 hours above 4,000 metres, in the cold and short of oxygen. They carry a dance rehearsed for weeks and a request. They do not go to pray for themselves, says Adrián Huamán, but to "sow dreams": that the animals multiply, that the house gets finished, that the world treats Mother Earth better.

The film is the first episode of the series Secreto Ancestral: guardianes de la medicina indígena, produced in 2021 by the Chilean company La Ventana Cine and directed by Jota Loyola Crovetto. It reaches YouTube under licence through the SLICE Iberia channel, owned by the French producer and distributor ZED.

A people high in the Andes

The Q'eros nation lives in the province of Paucartambo, in the Cusco region, and numbers about 3,000 people in five communities, according to Adrián. The narration presents them as heirs of the Incas who climbed the mountain to escape the Spanish conquest. Adrián is the son of a healer and explains the division between the pampa misayoq, who heals with the power of the earth, and the alto misayoq, said to hold the power of the sky. For his people, everything has spirit: the stone, the lake, the mountain.

The messenger

The film's thread is Adrián's life. At nine he went down to Cusco to study without speaking Spanish, and was beaten and insulted by classmates before making friends through football. Today he calls himself a messenger between his community and the West. The film takes him to the Elqui Valley, in Chile, for a ceremony of Indigenous peoples during a total solar eclipse, and shows the k'intu, the exchange of three coca leaves with good wishes breathed onto them, and the women's weavings, which he prefers to call altars.

Qoyllur Rit'i

The pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i, on the slopes of Ausangate, draws thousands of devotees from many Andean nations every year, and in 2011 UNESCO inscribed it on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The Q'eros perform the Wayri Ch'unchu, a tribute to the forest peoples who grow coca. The apus, the sacred mountains, keep the water in the glaciers. "If this glacier disappears, I think the culture of the Q'eros is over," Adrián says.

Why watch

The Inca origin and the healers' powers are oral tradition, told by the Q'eros themselves. The film's value lies in letting them speak, in their own words and their own landscape, and in showing that for them the climate crisis is no abstraction: it is the ice their water comes from.