HIGHER PURSUITS
IT’S HOLY FRIDAY in Quito, and tens of thousands of worshipers have gathered in the city’s 16th-century Centro Histórico for the annual procession of Jesús del Gran Poder. The conical purple hats of the cucuruchos—costumed penitents with chains fastened to their ankles or crosses of prickly cactus on their bare backs—bob up and down above the shoulders of the crowd like a rolling violet wave. Navigating the narrow, hilly streets through the flow of devotees is made even more challenging by the rarefied Andean air. At 2,850 meters above sea level, Quito is the world’s second-highest capital city, and I quickly find myself doubled over in an attempt to catch my breath. A passing trumpeter in a straw hat casts me a sympathetic gaze, uttering a single word of understanding: “Alto.” High, indeed.
Capturing a final shot of the parading cucuruchos, I make my way downhill to the cobblestoned Plaza de San Francisco. Concierge Alfonso Díaz is there with a smile and a handshake to usher me into Casa Gangotena, a century-old former mansion that, after three years of painstaking restoration, reopened in 2013 as a 31-room hotel with its original art nouveau and neoclassical architecture intact. Exhausted, I sink into a chair in the plant-filled atrium before heading upstairs to the rooftop terrace to watch the tail-end of the procession as it pours out of the Church and Convent of San Francisco.
At last the float carrying the —a 17th-century wooden statue of Christ on the path to Calvary—emerges, flanked by priests and a shoulder-to-shoulder cordon of riot police. Supplicants press in, calling out invocations and dashing their foreheads in the sign of the cross. Díaz passes me a basket of rose petals and I join the dozens of other guests gathered on the roof in showering the parade below with floral offerings.
