- The town of Catacocha, located in the south of Ecuador, is in a province known for being almost a desert: dry forest, barren soil and rains that only appear two months in the year.
- A historian discovered the water collection system long ago used by Palta Indigenous people and persuaded locals in Catacocha to apply it.
- By building 250 artificial lagoons, the inhabitants of this region have succeeded in managing rainwater.
- The change that has happened in nine years is visible: They sowed 12,000 plant,s and UNESCO has included the area in its list of ecohydrology demonstration sites.
There’s a legend that says the hill of Cerro Pisaca — female — and the hill of Cerro Cango — male — had a bull as a son that, in honor of its father, was named Torito Cango, based on the Spanish word for bull, toro.
The bull had a gift: With its roar, it could make clouds come together and it would rain. Out of jealousy, the locals in Ayabaca, a province in the neighboring country of Peru, sent four healers to steal it. But Torito Cango didn’t find the grass he liked to eat in that land. He escaped, and his captors, desperate, sent condors and snakes to hunt him, but he defeated them and went back to his mother’s foothills in the southern Ecuador province of Loja.
The people from Ayabaca didn’t give up, and they stole the prized animal again. But this time they also took all the grass it ate. Torito Cango never went back to that region of Ecuador and, according to the legend, it stopped raining there.
That’s why Catacocha, a small town in the district of Paltas, is so dry, barren and hot as a desert. That’s why it’s been so hard to get water — at least, that’s the explanation that locals held onto for years.
That changed a few years ago, when the work of a historian was key to bringing back a millennia-old Indigenous system that allows residents to have water today even in seasons of intense drought.
Not enough water
The neighborhood of San Vicente del Río, in the mountains of Catacocha in the middle of a dry forest in the low part of Cerro Pisaca, hosts some 80 families. Their houses are made of adobe and tiles, and many are abandoned, as their owners have moved to the city. One of the houses belongs to Rosa Imelda Arias, and its façade has been transformed into a garden. Dozens of plants hang from small plastic pots and fill the place with color. “It took me 15 years to create this garden”, Arias says. “Wherever I go, I take a plant. … I like them.”
A dog barks while Arias remembers a time when the drought was so relentless, they only had water four hours every day: two in the morning and two in the evening. “There was only enough for eating. If we wanted to wash [something] we had to go to the river or the stream, a small stream down the road that comes from a rock,” she says. “It’s a 15-minute walk to the stream. Half an hour to the river, or one hour, depending on how [fast] I walk. Before, when they weren’t bringing the water from up there, there wasn’t enough water.”
When she talks about “up there,” she means Cerro Pisaca, where the community has been re-creating, since 2005, a system of water collection and provision conceived by the Paltas, an Indigenous community that used to live in the area more than a thousand years ago, in the pre-Incan time. This system, consisting of 250 artificial lagoons on the mountain for storing rainwater, has allowed residents from this desert town to have water all the time, along with more and more abundant crops and healthy, well-nourished animals.
“Now we have water all day,” Arias says. She adds that she can also raise chicken and pigs and keep a small vegetable garden behind her house, where she grows oranges, mandarins, bananas and medicinal plants such as upright pellitory (Parietaria officinalis), “which is great for stomach ache.”
This water system changed their lives.
It rains during just a couple of months of the year in this region, between January and February. It’s lucky if there’s any rain in March; it’s extraordinary if it rains in April. There’s no rain for the rest of the year. The heat used to make the water reserves go away fast, and by August there used to be almost no water. It got to the point that the people only had water for one hour per day. However, thanks to the lagoons inspired by the Paltas, they now have underground infiltration that is so controlled and effective that the water collected during those two months lasts all year.
“Yes, we get water all day long,” says Rosaura Cobos, who works at a small grocery shop in San Vicente del Río. “They brought the water from somewhere else and so we have enough. Before, the sector down here got water one day and the sector up from here another day, by hours, not all day,” she says. “Now we have water all the time.” It’s almost noon, and in this neighborhood the sun is scorching, the dust ubiquitous and the wind unrelenting.
The discovery
How did this water miracle happen? When we ask people from these communities how it started, they talk about “the historian.” The historian is Galo Ramón, a local from Catacocha who grew up hearing the Torito Cango legend and a story about a lagoon they shouldn’t get close to because it was inhabited by snakes.
Ramón studied history in Quito, and although he stayed in the capital, his mind was always trying to find ways to fight drought in his hometown. “Water is a serious problem in the area,” he says.
“Suddenly, in one of these investigations, I found a land conflict, in 1680, that the communes of Coyana and Catacocha had with a landowner named Hortensio Celi. The dispute was about a lagoon in Pisaca and, although it didn’t say who won, the documents had a drawing of the lagoon,” he says.
“Looking at it attentively, it wasn’t a lagoon that fed on a gorge or watershed, but the other way around. Thanks to the lagoon, there were watersheds farther down. I started wondering how it got filled and, obviously, it was with rainwater.”
He found out that other hills also had their own lagoons and their own legends, although they were similar to Pisaca’s. “The Paltas created this system because they knew there were droughts. The rains can concentrate in one or two months, and these are violent rains: 700 millimeters [27.55 inches] in two months. So they had to make the most of that water, of these four or five huge downpours. They wanted to save the rainwater, dose its infiltration and reload the aquifers,” Ramón says.
All of this was done along the adequate management of runoff, through small retaining walls and water reservoirs made of stone next to the orchards to enable watering.
“We haven’t been able to define with precision when the Paltas developed this system,” Ramón says. “But my estimation is that they were created around year 900 of our time because the most important growth of these people happened after year 500.”
“They knew where there was more permeability in the soil by looking at what I call the line of greenery. This line can be observed in August or September when it doesn’t rain but some plants with deep roots resist and allow us to see where the aquifer is. That’s where they created the lagoons.”
The Paltas’ lagoons dried out little by little after the colonial era because they stopped using them, forced by the conquerors and the new imposed religion. The first one to disappear, in 1605, was the Catacocha lagoon, right where the town of Catacocha was then founded. And the last one to dry out, according to Ramón’s records, was the Pisaca lagoon, which still had water 80 years ago.
Ramón puts it like this: “The Paltas made offerings to the lagoons, a type of cult and rituals that aren’t described anywhere. The Spaniards, and the priests especially, wanted to suppress that cult to lagoons. They saw it as a threat and they wanted to fight what they call ‘old religions.’
“They used their own myths, told them the lagoons were diabolic, that they had snakes inside, that women would get pregnant if they got close, that men could be murdered. They told them water is a gift from the god they were imposing and that, if they wanted rain, they had to pray to ‘him’ and the virgin,” he says.
When he tells the story, the historian gets emotional. He says that when he understood everything, he thought, “We need to apply the Paltas’ knowledge again.” In 2005, he talked about it with the residents but at first he wasn’t able to persuade them. He found an old population — “the youngest people were 60 years old” — and they weren’t enthusiastic about the endeavor.
That’s when the historian made up another legend. “I wrote it and called it ‘the return of Torito Cango.’ It’s a reverse myth,” he says. “It tells how we recovered the bull, and the water came back. The secret was to create lagoons and for them to have grass so the bull would return when it realized we created the right conditions. People were enthusiastic and we started the process.”
The new lagoons
Galo Ramón leads Fundación Comunidec, an organization that fights for water, human rights and culture. In 2005, with some international cooperation, a group of locals and a big minga (a community practice of cooperation and collective labor) rehabilitated the two biggest lagoons that the Paltas had built, and in five years, they built 248 more. In total, there are 250 lagoons in addition to the new reservoirs allowing to replicate the system created more than a thousand years ago.
“We built some of the lagoons with backhoes,” Ramón says. They did the rest manually to protect the ecosystem. “First, you need to strip the topsoil: Move the horizon, more or less 30 centimeters [11.8 inches] of earth, and save it to put it back later. When the vessel for the lagoon, which isn’t deep like a swimming pool but like a spoon, is ready, we put the organic soil back and sow couch grass.” This type of hydrophilic grass enables controlled filtration.
Visually — as seen in aerial photographs — this system looks like bleachers. The two biggest lagoons, at the heart of everything, collect the rainwater and it starts going down from lagoon to lagoon underground until it reaches the places where water emerges again from the earth.
The storage capacity of the 28 lagoons closest to Cerro Pisaca, in the area known by locals as “the reserve,” is of 182,482 cubic meters (48.2 million gallons). The biggest one has a capacity of 78,422 cubic meters (20.7 million gallons) and the smallest one, on private property, of only 143 (37,700 gallons), according to the book Ecohydrology and its implementation in Ecuador, published with the support of the UNESCO, ecohydrology program, the Paltas municipality and Ingeraleza.
Reforestation and care
In December 2010, the foundation Nature and Culture International —working to preserve water and the environment in different regions of Ecuador — bought, for $160,000, the 406 hectares (1,003 acres) around Pisaca that make up “the reserve.” They bought them from a landowner to ensure their conservation by taking the cattle away from the forest and reforesting the area to enable the collection and distribution of water.
“[Cerro] Pisaca — which means partridge in Kichwa language — is one of the most important centers for Palta culture,” says José Romero, the foundation’s spokesperson and an agriculture engineer specialized in water basins. “That’s where they developed and, for many years, perfected the system until they achieved the management of moisture in a very dry, very rugged territory. Recovering that is part of our principles: ensuring water access for the entire population in Catacocha. It’s that important.”
Romero says buying lands for conservation is one of the policies that has worked the best for them because they can make decisions without depending on others. With cattle out of the area, they had a strong stage of reforestation and permanent maintenance of the lagoons so that infiltration doesn’t lose its efficacy.
The first sowing works were on Feb. 12, 2011. The community got together to carry seeds from the nursery they had built into the forest. These seeds would allow them to sow the first plants. The members of Nature and Culture International call it “recovering the vegetation cover.” In 2012, they were joined by the water boards — community associations for water management — and the eco-club of Loja’s Marist school.
Reforestation, as they describe it, happened in three different ways: sowing or active restoration, enriching the vegetation of areas that were recovering after the cattle were removed and by natural regeneration in some specific areas that were closed to prevent animals from entering and where vegetation started recovering on its own.
In total, they intervened in 240 of the 406 hectares in the reserve (593 of the 1,003 acres); 40 hectares (98.8 acres) were in the hands of Nature and Culture International and the other 200 (494 acres) entrusted to the Mancomunidad Bosque Seco (Association of the Dry Forest), an association of six municipalities in the dry area of Loja that works on programs to “obtain more effectivity in the conservation of natural resources.”
In nine years, between 2021 and 2020, they sowed at least 40,000 plants, of which 12,000 survived. “Mortality is very high because of the conditions of the soil; it reaches 50-60%,” Romero says. “Every year we had to sow between 3,000 and 5,000 plants for the ones that are there now to survive.”
They chose native species of carob, walnut, porknut, fig and other trees, as well as species of primary succession – the first to grow in the area, which help with water filtration.
In 2013, the municipality of Paltas declared the lagoon area as a conservation and sustainable use area because a big part of the water that Catacocha uses comes from Cerro Pisaca.
The success of the work in this dry area was such that in 2018, UNESCO’s International Hydrological Program included it in its list of ecohydrology demonstration sites. According to the organization, “Since 2011 UNESCO-IHP promotes the establishment of various demonstration sites around the world to apply Ecohydrology solutions in watersheds at all scales. Each demonstration site aims to apply Ecohydrology principles and solutions to solve both social and environmental issues.” Currently, in Latin America and the Caribbean, there are nine sites in the list: two in Ecuador, two in Colombia and one each in Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and the Bahamas.
“The area itself is one of the driest in the province. We have always had to fight the drought. But if we don’t continue with the measures we are taking, what climate change can do is radicalizing everything. That’s why the management and the protection of the system that we have re-created in the Pisaca are key,” Romero says.
The future and the happy days
At 85, Antonio Díaz is a happy man. It’s visible every time he speaks, in his jokes and on his face when he says (always adding a diminutive) that he has around 20 little hens, five little pigs, 15 little cows, a little donkey. When we ask about the guinea pigs that wander freely in the kitchen and the corridors, he laughs and says, “Yes, I have about 40 of those.”
He’s always lived here, in Santa Gertrudis, another village in the foothills of Cerro Pisaca. “Here it’s beautiful because of the calm. There is silence,” Díaz says. “There’s no fuss, it’s quiet, you can sleep.”
Every morning at 6 a.m., Díaz leaves his house to check on his lagoon, a few meters from his house, and goes up the hill on his donkey. “This is my vehicle,” he jokes. When he gets there, he changes the direction of the sprinklers so that all of his harvest is well-hydrated. “It used to look like a little row, two little rows, because the water would dry out. Now I can sow 10 little rows,” he says. “To me, this has been really good. There used to be much less production in the drought seasons. Water is the most important thing. Since we did this, I haven’t lacked water.”
In his garden, he has vegetables, coffee, bananas, cassava, corn, peanuts and beans. His production is mainly for family use but he also sells it in the Catacocha market. He says he earns $70 every month.
The next objective of Nature and Culture International is for the Ministry of Environment to declare this reserve in Cerro Pisaca a Hydric Protection Area. This would shield the area so the land use could not be changed and, for example, extractive activities wouldn’t be allowed. Romero explains that there is urgency in achieving this because a couple of years ago, the state granted a mining concession in the area to Australian company Titan Minerals, which is now in the exploration stage.
Mongabay Latam tried to contact the mining company to learn about the advance of the exploration and the areas where they will work, but didn’t get a response. However, according to the specialized magazine Minergía: “Titan’s flagship is their gold project Dynasty, in the south of Ecuador, close to the border with Peru and holds resources for an estimated cost of 2.1 million gold ounces, with an impressive grade of 4.5 grams per ton. Dynasty is an exploration project in an advanced stage in Loja that comprises five concessions that amount to 139 square kilometers [53.6 square miles].”
The Ministry of Environment confirmed to Mongabay Latam that the declaration of Pisaca’s reserve as an Area of Hydric Protection is underway. “The declaration is part of the 2023 plan for hydric protection,” the Ministry said in an official response. In addition, it confirmed that if this comes to be, Pisaca would be part of the National System of Protected Areas. “Therefore, this means formalizing the protection, recovery and conservation of the water sources of public interest.” This implies closing the door to mining activities.
For now, Antonio Díaz doesn’t think about mining. He goes back down the hill to his house because he needs to go on with his chores. After changing the water sprinklers for his garden and carrying his produce on his donkey, he needs to weed many parts of the land and take care of his animals. “Listen, I don’t have enough time in the day,” he says — but always with a smile.
Banner image: Antonio Díaz next to the lagoon that he uses to water his crops. Image by Alexis Serrano.
This story was reported by Mongabay’s Latam team and first published here on our Latam site on Feb. 13, 2024.
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