The Hill of the Skull

By Jeremy Bassetti, Pico Iyer and Alys Tomlinson

In his cross-genre book The Hill of the Skull, Jeremy Bassetti takes us on a spellbinding pilgrimage to a holy mountain in the heart of the Bolivian Andes during the little-known Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña. Featuring a 7,000 word hybrid memoir, 50 black-and-white photographs, an afterword by celebrated writer Pico Iyer, and a be

• Language: English
• Publisher: Artifact International
• Release date: Dec 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989467112

Book preview

1

THE HILL OF THE SKULL

One mid-August morning, I boarded a bus at the Plazuela Corazonistas in Cochabamba and gripped the handrail as it bounced west on Highway 4. A foul empanada I ate had my stomach in a knot and my legs weakened. My busmates—the ones lucky enough to have seats—secured sacks of potatoes between their legs, but even that couldn’t prevent the errant tuber from tumbling down the aisle when the bus, as it often did, jerked to the side of the highway to let on more passengers. Some travelers cradled miniature statues of the Virgin Mary in their arms, securing the precious cargo as the rattletrap juddered on. After thirty minutes, the driver stopped at a busy intersection and announced that we had arrived at the end of the line: Quillacollo.

I imagined Quillacollo would be a small, dusty town in the Andes. If Quillacollo is a small town, it is not one in population. Its streets could hardly hold the tens of thousands of pilgrims visiting for the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña. If it weren’t for the festival and the crush of people, this forlorn corner of Bolivia might be any other city in the Andean foothills: half-built buildings standing idly, mongrels nosing through yesterday’s trash on sidewalks, cholitas hawking wares from under wide-brimmed hats, and parents employing their dirty-footed children to beg on street corners. But now, a swarm of pilgrims had descended upon this town like a plague of locusts. I was one of them.

I wasn’t a pilgrim in the religious sense. Despite my mother’s effort to introduce me to Catholicism, religion never gripped me as she hoped. I was a pilgrim in the other sense of the term: a visitor from another land. Except I came to the festival to do research on the sacred mountain that pilgrims visit during the event, and to document its costumes for a photography project. Perhaps not unlike a haji visiting Mecca for the first time, I felt a deep sense of duty and joy for having finally arrived. The pandemic had postponed the festival, and my project, in each of the last two years. Now I found myself in Quillacollo eager to get to work and woozy, no less because of the altitude or the foul empanada than the surge of people swirling around me.

Peddlers had gathered to hawk ice cream, drinks, and souvenir photographs at the Temple of San Ildefonso, Quillacollo’s main cathedral and the home to the Virgin of Urkupiña. Some pilgrims brought their own replicas of the Virgin to the cathedral to receive blessings from a priest, but not before buying them new outfits from one of the nearby tailors who specialize in miniature dresses. A little photo? the tourist photographers asked the pilgrims after leaving the tailor. A little souvenir?

I was snapping photos and scribbling notes around the cathedral when I locked eyes with one of the tourist photographers. The woman waved me over and asked what I was up to and why I was taking photos of the pilgrims like her. I told her I was in town working on a documentary project.

Are you a journalist? she said.

No, I said. Just working on a personal project.

But, for what?

I hesitated to explain my work to her.