Copacabana

Not the beach. The original Copacabana is a small town on Lake Titicaca where the water is so high and so blue it looks lit from below. Reed boats, a white basilica, and cloth in every shade of that blue on the steps down to the shore. Our lightest denim cap, with the palest brim, is named for it, and it belongs to the lake family, Qucha.

The lake

Titicaca lies at 3,800 metres on the border of Peru and Bolivia, the largest lake in South America by volume and the highest lake in the world that big ships can sail. In Andean belief the sun was born from it, on the Isla del Sol just off Copacabana, and the first Inca walked out of the water there to found Cusco. The thin air makes the light hard and the water an unreasonable blue. Boats woven from totora reed still work the shore.

The town

Copacabana is a pilgrimage town before it is anything else. The Moorish-style basilica holds the Virgen de Copacabana, patron of Bolivia, and drivers bring cars and buses to the square to have them blessed with flowers and beer. The Rio de Janeiro beach was named after this town, not the other way round. Walk down from the square to the water and the shore is pebbles, wooden boats, and the lake going out flat to brown hills on the far side.

The cap named Copacabana

The Copacabana is a light-wash denim five-panel with a handwoven Andean stripe brim and tan chakana embroidery, the palest of our three denim caps. The Titicaca blue turns up again on the Puno ball cap, named for the Peruvian town across the water, and on the deep blue La Paz. See the denim caps.

Other cities

All twenty on the cities. Cusco · Písac · Urubamba · Maras · Puno · Huaraz · Arequipa · Nazca · Paracas · Callao · Iquitos · Cajamarca · Tacna · La Paz · El Alto · Oruro · Potosí · Sucre · Cochabamba. See all the pieces named for Andean towns on headwear, and the cloth families on the weaves.