Quechua-speaking people live in and around the national park, practicing a community-based agrarian life that has remained little-changed since the time of the Incas.

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It was a voice so sonorously deep, yet so delicately controlled, that it seemed to issue forth from the Pachamama herself, the earth goddess of the Quechua-speaking people of the Inca empire from whom Ms Sosa partially descended.

ECONOMIST: The soundtrack of a past era

The mountain's highest peak is the Guagua ("child" in Quechua), a two-hour hike from the town of Lloa, a one-hour drive south-west of Quito.

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Increasing poverty, and anger that sacred Quechua sites were being exploited, led to a violent four-day occupation of one Canadian-owned gold mine in 1996.

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