Rural tourism and local artists (Ecuador)

Some decades ago a group of indigenous painters appeared in Tiguá, a small settlement in the Ecuadorian Andes near the Cotopax volcano. Their naïf and colourful style combines the daily agricultural labour of the inhabitants with the natural world around them, integrating biocultural aspects of their history and legends into biodiversity and the land.

They clearly represent the joint work of women and men in the harvest, the use of baby-carriers where women carry babies while they work or sew, and the integration of endemic plants and animals with those introduced after colonisation (potato and rye, sheep and llamas, condor…).   They also show the recent incorporation of tourism as an economic activity in their agricultural world.