Living in Peru : your everyday companion

By Matthew Finch

As fireworks glittered above the rooftops of Ayacucho at midnight Monday morning, bleary-eyed city residents breathed a well-deserved sigh of relief.

The pyrotechnics marked the beginning of Dia de Huamanga, a provincial holiday which happens to fall immediately after the Easter weekend this year. Grateful Ayacuchanos took the opportunity to sleep off the worst excesses of Semana Santa, safe in the knowledge that shops, schools and offices will largely remain closed until Tuesday.

Since April 14, Ayacucho’s city center has been crowded with tourists both foreign and domestic, all of whom recognise that the most important week in the Catholic calendar is also an excuse for an incredible party.

Hundreds gather in Ayacucho for the bull run.

The bulls are not actually let loose: the idea is the spectacle. "It's not Pamplona," says an organizer.

The religious ceremonies climax with a dawn procession on Easter Sunday, marking the belief in Christ’s resurrection, but for many the highlight of Holy Week was the traditional pascuatoro, which sees bulls being driven through the streets of the city center.

At 8 a.m. on Saturday morning, crowds began to gather as the animals were prepared in a special corral. Five bulls, destined for the dinner tables of the city’s poor and needy, were released to charge through the city streets, restrained only by the lasso of a mounted morochuco, or Andean cowhand, from the hill villages overlooking the city.

For 350 years, local landowners in Ayacucho have brought cattle to the city plaza, a gift permitting everyone in the town to eat the traditional Easter roast dish, Pascuacanca. This was Christian charity, but also a chance for the city’s great and good to demonstrate their wealth and beneficence. Traditionally the meat was divided among street children, prisoners and the elderly.

Agrarian reforms and the civil conflict with Shining Path brought an end to the Pascuatoro in the mid-twentieth century, but it was recently revived by local students researching the history of their city.

In 1993, ten undergraduates from the Universidad Nacional de San Cristobal de Huamanga rediscovered the Pascuatoro. Being young and adventurous, they added the jalatoro, a bull-running element, in which spectators charge ahead of the animals as they race from the city outskirts to the central plaza. (Previously, those in service to the landowners had run with the bulls out of necessity, accompanying their masters on horseback).

By 1999, the year in which many refugees from the civil conflict returned to the city, some ten thousand visitors attended the Pascuatoro festivities, a number which has grown year on year since.

2011’s Pascuatoro was deemed a success by organizer Gloria Parra Ruiz, 28, who runs the event a team of just thirty young volunteers.

“In previous years, there’s been some concern about animal welfare,” she told me, “but this isn’t Pamplona, where the bulls run free in the streets. The riders protect the bulls as much as the spectators, and we don’t blunt the bulls’ horns — that’s to discourage people from playing the bullfighter!”

The issue of animal rights hangs over the jalatoro, especially as it is a relatively new addition to the centuries-old tradition of Pascuatoro. Despite questions over authenticity and animal rights, the running of the bulls is adored by the residents of Ayacucho and the many thousands of visitors to whom they play host each year — a vital moment of celebration in a city still haunted by the reputation of its grim history. Even the sole unfortunate participant who fell before a bull on Saturday morning was content to dust himself down and walk away with a smile, cheered on by an enthusiastic crowd.


As the visitors begin to depart, the city enjoys a well-deserved day of rest — but not for long. Even as Ayacucho reflects on another successful Semana Santa, Gloria and her team are looking forward to 2012 — already planning for an even bigger and brighter Pascuatoro next year.



Matt Finch is a globetrotting British writer and educator, currently based in Peru and blogging at booksadventures.blogspot.com.

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