Photo Gallery

The old Church of Santa Ana in Chipaya was built of adobe (air-dried mud bricks) and had a fragile thatched roof (paja). The photograph shows the roof being repaired (1976). Due to the extreme weather conditions in the highlands (strong winds, sandstorms and seasonal flooding from the River Lauca), the unprotected mud walls of the old structure crumbled over the decades after the roof was damaged. Rather than undertaking a costly restoration of the old, dilapidated adobe church, a new, modern church building was erected in the village centre. The historic, free-standing bell tower from the colonial era, which was deliberately built in isolation and completely separate from the main building, remained standing untouched as an important landmark and ritual focal point for the village community. – Chipaya (Oruro Department) – Bolivia – 1976

The Chipaya tribe in the Bolivian department of Oruro, which now numbers just under a thousand people, inhabits a particularly inhospitable region of the Andean high plateau on the Río Lauca, which flows into a salt lake. The Chipayas are the only highland indigenous people who obtain part of their food through hunting, as agriculture and livestock farming alone are unable to meet their needs due to the highly saline soil. At dawn, groups of hunters lie in wait on the lake shore for flamingos, ducks and Andean geese, which they catch using bolas – throwing balls attached to long straps. The word ‘Chipaya’ comes from the Aymara language and means ‘a mat of reed or straw woven with reed cords’. To protect themselves from the strong winds of the Altiplano, the Chipayas have, in fact, had to tie down the thatched layers of their roofs with cords since time immemorial. The belief that the Chipayas are the direct descendants of pre-Inca populations is supported by mummy finds in burial towers from that period, which, amongst other similarities, display the same hairstyles that the women spend hours and hours creating. - Book: Picture 155 - Bolivia - 1976