Oruro

For fifty weeks of the year Oruro is a mining town on the high plain of Bolivia, cold, flat and plain. For the other two it is the carnival. The Carnaval de Oruro is the biggest festival in the country and one of the great ones in the Americas, a procession of tens of thousands of dancers in embroidered costumes that goes on for twenty hours without stopping. Our Oruro cap is cut from a carnival weave, and it belongs to the sun family, Inti.

The high plain

Oruro sits at 3,700 metres on the altiplano, halfway between La Paz and the salt flats of Uyuni, at the foot of a bare hill that was mined for silver and then for tin. The tin made the town rich in the early twentieth century and left it when the price fell. It is not a pretty place. It is a working one, which in Bolivia usually means the cloth is good.

The carnival

The carnival began as an Andean festival for the earth and the mountain spirits and took a Catholic saint's name when the Spanish arrived; both are still in it. The centrepiece is the Diablada, the dance of the devils, in masks with bulging eyes and horns, and around it dozens of other dances, each with its own guild and costume. The costumes are embroidered by hand over months, and the weave on our cap borrows its colour from them: carnival stripe on black, warm threads leading.

The cap named Oruro

The Oruro is a curved-brim ball cap in a carnival stripe weave on black with gold chakana embroidery, a full-weave ball cap whose warm threads put it in the sun family beside the Nazca and the Arequipa bag. Its altiplano neighbour to the south is the Potosí.

Other cities

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