Awamaki
Social Enterprise
Local/Foreign Owned
Day Trips, Multi-Day Tours
Activities: Community Visit, Cultural Activities, Making Crafts, Family Homestay, Weaving
Explore Ollantaytambo and its surrounding villages and get to know the people that live there with authentic cultural experiences you can’t find anywhere else. You can take a variety of cultural tours and artisan workshops that will bring you off the beaten track to experience Andean culture; try spinning on the ancient Andean drop spindle, learn to cook local specialties, visit a local "Ollantino” family, or improve your Spanish in a language class.
Awamki works directly with rural Adean women to provide them with a reliable source of income to increase their families’ quality of life and well-being. The opportunites are endless with this powerful collective community.
Lokal Travel Badges
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Community
Awamaki partners with cooperatives of rural Andean women to provide training and market access. These partner cooperatives weave, knit, spin and sew. Awamki offers them trainings in quality control, product development and technical skills improvement so they can better promote and grow their businesses. Many people living in the Ollantaytambo region speak only their native Quechua and no Spanish. By partnering with a local Spanish school, Awamki offered free training to local women to learn to teach Spanish. After six months of training, they graduated ten teachers, mostly young single moms. They now teach Spanish to volunteers, students and tourists alike and specialize in preparing students of all levels for life in Ollantatyambo.
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Culture
Awamaki's network of weavers, knitters, spinners, and teachers work together to preserve their culture and improve their way of living. Spinners spin their local alpacca yarn and provide it directly to other local weavers who then transform it in to traditional dress including layered skirts with woven trim, red jackets decorated with white buttons, and a bowl-shaped hats with hand-beaded chin straps. Knitters design and create local knitwear which has been sought after all across the globe from the US to the UK and Japan. One of the knitting cooperatives Awamaki works with has even won a grant from the United Nations to help them learn more about making their cooperative into a small business.