Peru’s great festivals belong to the Andes — the Inca sun festival staged again at Saqsaywaman, a pilgrimage below the glaciers, Cusco’s saints in procession and weeks of dance on the shore of Lake Titicaca, where Catholic feasts and Andean beliefs have long been woven together.
Photo: De los Ordoño, Ortega, Mendoza, Cahuana, Gomez, Holguin de PLATERIA, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Peruvian festivals in this atlas all come from the southern Andes, around Cusco and Puno. Many of them blend Catholic worship with older Andean beliefs: the Virgen de la Candelaria is celebrated with symbols of the Andean worldview, and the pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i joins Catholic devotion to the worship of pre-Hispanic deities of nature.
Two of them are inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: the Qoyllur Rit’i pilgrimage in 2011 and the festival of the Virgen de la Candelaria of Puno in 2014.
Festividad de la Virgen de la Candelaria
Each February, Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca honours its patron saint with Peru’s largest festival of music and dance — about a hundred thousand dancers and ten thousand musicians, most of them Quechua and Aymara, and weeks of masses, processions and contests.
February 1 – 15, 2027Estimated
Quyllurit'i
In a high valley below the glaciers of the Cusco region, tens of thousands of pilgrims gather each year for the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i — a feast that joins Catholic devotion to older Andean beliefs about nature and the stars, with a hundred dances and a day-and-night procession to greet the sunrise.
May 25, 2027Estimated
Corpus Christi del Cusco
On the feast of Corpus Christi, the parishes of Cusco carry fifteen images of saints and virgins into the Plaza de Armas, where they process with the cathedral’s gold and silver monstrance and then stay in the cathedral for a week — a Catholic feast shaped by centuries of Andean devotion and rivalry.
May 26 – 27, 2027Calculated
Every 24 June, Cusco stages the great sun festival of the Inca Empire — a procession from the temple of Qorikancha through the Plaza de Armas to the stone terraces of Saqsaywaman, with hundreds of performers, revived in 1944 from the accounts of a sixteenth-century chronicler.
June 24, 2027Calculated