The Andean Mesa, the Despacho and the Apu

The Q'ero themselves were largely unknown outside their region until a 1955 expedition brought them to wider attention. Much of what now circulates internationally as ancient 'Q'ero prophecy' and initiation rites is a documented construction of the 1990s tourism era, built on top of that older ethnographic record.

Pablo José de Arriaga's 1621 extirpation-of-idolatry record of offerings to the apus; Óscar Núñez del Prado's 1955 expedition