LA CHIMBA, A PÁRAMO COMMUNITY

La Chimba is located at 3000 meters (9900 feet) at the foot of the glaciated Cayambe Volcano about three hours north of Quito and borders the high alpine grasslands, or páramo, of the Cayambe-Coca Ecological Reserve. Condor sightings are frequent.

The area has historically been a center of indigenous resistance to colonization, going back to the invasion of the Inca and the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish.

In the 1950's Yacuchimba was the epicenter of one of the first Indigenous levantamientos, or uprisings, against the authority of the state and the hacienda system which kept Indigenous laborers in debt peonage. This levanamiento was the first in a series that eventually forced the land reform laws of the 1960s which broke up the haciendas. The nearly 100-year-old leader of this uprising, Transito Amaguaña, still lives by herself in a one-room house in town and is revered by Latin America's egalitarian social change movement as a hero and revolutionary.

The Kayambi population lives by farming and raising dairy cows, with fields surrounded by mud walls planted with agave. Although communal land won through the Land Reforms was divided into six hectare family farms in the 1980's, the division of these lands between many children has left most of La Chimba's youth without a viable agricultural option, forcing many to leave the land and migrate to the cities.

Seeing sustainable economic development as a requisite to preserving their culture, a group of young people have joined together to develop ecotourism as an alternative to migration.