The Retablos of Ayacucho

The Ayacucho retablo grew out of the cajón de San Marcos, a small hinged box of saints that herders carried and opened for blessings on the animals. Makers kept the hinged form, painted the doors with flowers, and filled the inside with scenes: a market, a hat workshop, a fiesta, a harvest, a nativity, modelled in a paste of potato flour and gypsum, dried and painted in hard bright colour. A large piece can carry several hundred figures on three or four levels. The workshops are family homes in the Santa Ana district, where weavers also work Wari and Nazca motifs on treadle looms and the nearby village of Quinua makes the ceramic churches that sit on roofs across the region.

What you actually see

• The retablo boxes - hinged cases holding hundreds of modelled figures in tiers.
• The workshops - family houses in Santa Ana where the figures are modelled and painted.
• The weavers - treadle looms working Wari and Nazca designs in the same district.
• Quinua ceramics - the small clay churches placed on roofs across the region.

When to go

Year-round. Workshops are homes rather than shops, so weekday mornings give the best chance of finding someone in and working rather than out. Holy Week fills the city and the makers sell hard that week, but they also have less time to talk. Ask before photographing anyone at the bench.

Honest expectations

Good work is expensive and the cheap souvenir-shop versions are cast from moulds and roughly painted; the difference in hours is enormous and so is the price. Workshop hours are informal and you may knock on three doors and find nobody. Large pieces are fragile and awkward to get home, and although makers pack them well, airlines do what airlines do. Hard bargaining here mostly buys worse work.

Nearby

Ayacucho's colonial centre, the Wari ruins and the ceramics village of Quinua.